Organizations in the age of post-bureaucracy 9781845448998, 9781845448981

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Volume 19 Number 1 2006

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Organizational Change Management Organizations in the age of post-bureaucracy Guest Editors: Martin Harris and Harro Höpfl

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Journal of

ISSN 0953-4814

Organizational Change Management

Volume 19 Number 1 2006

Organizations in the age of post-bureaucracy Guest Editors Martin Harris and Harro Ho¨pfl

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Editorial advisory board ___________________________

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Introduction _______________________________________

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Post-bureaucracy and Weber’s “modern” bureaucrat Harro M. Ho¨pfl_________________________________________________

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Are we living in a post-bureaucratic epoch? Brendan McSweeney_____________________________________________

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Workload allocation models and “collegiality” in academic departments Richard Hull ___________________________________________________

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From bureaucratic to post-bureaucratic: the difficulties of transition Emmanuel Josserand, Stephen Teo and Stewart Clegg _________________

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CONTENTS

CONTENTS continued

A structurationist analysis of post-bureaucracy in modernity and late modernity Louise Briand and Guy Bellemare __________________________________

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Technology, innovation and post-bureaucracy: the case of the British Library Martin Harris __________________________________________________

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Call for papers ____________________________________________

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Journal of Organizational Change Management Vol. 19 No. 1, 2006 p. 4 # Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0953-4814

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD James Barker HQ USAFA/DFM Colorado Springs, USA David Barry University of Auckland, New Zealand Jean Bartunek Boston College, USA Dominique Besson IAE de Lille, France Steven Best University of Texas-El Paso, USA Michael Bokeno Murray State University, Kentucky, USA Mary Boyce University of Redlands, USA Warner Burke Columbia University, USA Adrian Carr University of Western Sydney-Nepean, Australia Stewart Clegg University of Technology (Sydney), Australia David Collins University of Essex, UK Cary Cooper Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, UK Ann L. Cunliffe University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Robert Dennehy Pace University, USA Eric Dent University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, USA Alexis Downs The Business School, Emporia State University, Kansas, USA Ken Ehrensal Kutztown University, USA Max Elden University of Houston, USA Andre´ M. Everett University of Otago, New Zealand Dale Fitzgibbons Illinois State University, USA Jeffrey Ford Ohio State University, USA Jeanie M. Forray Western New England College, USA Robert Gephart University of Alberta, Canada Clive Gilson University of Waikato, New Zealand Andy Grimes Lexington, Kentucky, USA Usha C.V. Haley School of Business, University of New Haven, USA Heather Ho¨pfl Professor of Management, University of Essex, UK

Maria Humphries University of Waikato, New Zealand Arzu Iseri Bogazici University, Turkey David Jamieson Pepperdine University, USA Campbell Jones Management Centre, University of Leicester, UK David Knights Keele University, UK Monika Kostera Va¨xjo¨ University, Sweden Hugo Letiche University for Humanist Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands Benyamin Lichtenstein University of Hartford, Connecticut, USA Stephen A. Linstead Durham Business School, University of Durham, UK Slawek Magala Erasmus University, The Netherlands Rickie Moore E.M. Lyon, France Ken Murrell University of West Florida, USA Eric Nielsen Case Western Reserve University, USA Walter Nord University of South Florida, USA Ellen O’Connor Chronos Associates, Los Altos, California, USA Cliff Oswick King’s College, University of London, UK Ian Palmer University of Technology (Sydney), Australia Michael Peron The University of Paris, Sorbonne, France Gavin M. Schwarz University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Abraham Shani California Polytechnic State University, USA Ralph Stablein Massey University, New Zealand Carol Steiner Monash University, Australia David S. Steingard St Joseph’s University, USA Ram Tenkasi Benedictine University, USA Tojo Joseph Thatchenkery George Mason University, Fairfax, USA Christa Walck Michigan Technological University, USA Richard Woodman Graduate School of Business, Texas A&M University, USA

Introduction About the Guest Editors Martin Harris is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex. Martin has written widely on the information society and he has edited (with Ian McLoughlin) Innovation, Organisational Change and Technology. His research has been published in leading journals such as The Journal of Management Studies, The Journal of Information Technology, and Information, Communication and Society. E-mail: [email protected] Harro Ho¨pfl is a Reader in the Department of Accounting, Finance and Management in the University of Essex. His research and publications have mainly focussed on conceptions of authority, order and hierarchy, especially in the political doctrine and practice of religious organisations and thinkers. His most recent publication is Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540-1630, Cambridge University Press, 2004. His current teaching is on accountability. E-mail: [email protected]

Organization in the age of post-bureaucracy One of the most pervasive themes to emerge in the intellectual debates of the last 15 years has been the “discourse of endings” – derived, in large part, from a belief that the age of “high” modernity has given way to a period of late or post-modernity (Reed and Courpasson, 2004). The sense that the advanced industrial societies had reached an historic “ending” was germane to the “disorganized” forms of production which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s (Lash and Urry, 1987), and it has featured heavily in recent accounts of the new information and communications technologies (Castells, 2000). The master theme of discontinuity has also been reflected in the work of those who rejected the systemic unity and coherence of the rationalist “control” model of organization (Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Clegg, 1990). A parallel and related “ending” is the perceived decline of the welfare state, a growing disenchantment with bureaucratic modes of organizing, and the rise of the “new public management” (Hood, 1998; Greenwood et al., 2002). Recent comment and debate in critical management theory points, however, to both a theoretical counter-movement and to a more nuanced view of bureaucracy and its relevance for contemporary societies. Large complex organizations have become increasingly heterodox and what has emerged is not “the end of bureaucracy”, but a more complex and differentiated set of “post-bureaucratic” possibilities which have acted to undermine many time-honoured distinctions (market versus hierarchy; centralisation versus decentralisation; public versus private sectors) (Reed and Courpasson, 2004). Whilst there can be little doubt that real and significant changes are underway, it has become apparent that there is no necessary trajectory of historic decline in the bureaucratic form. Yet, many aspects of the post-bureaucratic organization remain under-theorised and under-researched and it is with this in mind that we have assembled the contributions, which make up this special issue. The papers are presented in two loose groupings. The authors in the first group, (Ho¨pfl; McSweeney and Hull) address some fundamental issues raised by “the post-bureaucratic turn” locating the complex changes associated with the latter in the broader historical, intellectual and political context.

Introduction

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Harro Ho¨pfl’s re-examination of the Weberian corpus reveals that the so-called “Weberian ideal type” is only ambiguously related to what Weber himself wrote. Weber constructed his ideal type from materials, which reflect a typically nineteenth century preoccupation with historical periodisation. Contrary to the retrospective interpretations of business academics, the Weberian ideal type says very little about the character of modern bureaucracy. Ho¨pfl shows that Weber’s ideal type can be re-theorized to include “any non-contradictory attributes”. It follows that there can be adaptations of bureaucracy, but ex hypothesi there cannot be a “post-bureaucratic era”. The paper by Brendan McSweeney draws on evidence on the reform of the UK civil service over the last two decades to show the intensification of bureaucracy. The paper takes issue with the “epochalist” visions of sudden transformation which have underpinned much of the comment on post-bureaucracy, arguing that the concept of post-bureaucracy is analytically blind to the diversity and complexity of contemporary organizational change. Locating the debate on post-bureaucracy in the broader political economy of neo-conservatism reveals an authoritarian dimension which has been absent from most commentaries. Richard Hull’s paper presents new research on workload allocation models (WAMs) and the new public management (NPM) in the UK university system. The paper draws on the historical sociology of the professions to highlight the dilemmas posed by the adoption of WAMs. Hull argues that calls for increased resources to deal with WAM technology are likely to entail further bureaucratization. The paper concludes by arguing that a more transparent and accountable approach to academic work may offer a more viable way forward than elitist notions of “collegiality”. Many accounts of post-bureaucracy literature have pointed up the increasing use of private sector models in the public sector organization – (Alvesson and Thompson, 2004). However, existing research shows that the changes associated with the NPM are mediated by the particularities of individual cases. Our second group of papers (written by Josserand, Teo and Clegg; Briand and Bellemare and Harris) examines some of these issues, and in doing so show the diverse and multifaced nature of the changes underway in public sector organizations. Josserand, Teo and Clegg examine the difficulties experienced in the putative “refurbishment” of a large Australian public sector agency as it made the transition to “corporatization”. Their case study is focused on the transition from personnel management to a more “strategic” role for the human resources function. These changes entailed inherently intractable problems associated with the “stickiness of identity” and the politics of network formation within the organization. Briand and Bellemare show the complex changes which occurred at the IRDC, a Canadian international development agency. The shows fundamental clash of values. The reform has brought about a “new order” which relies on a centralized model of governance. Moves towards the “post-bureaucratic organization” have entailed intensified surveillance and produced a new structure of domination. The paper by Martin Harris questions contemporary accounts of “the network enterprise” and “the virtual organization”, arguing that these are founded on a logic which abstracts innovation from its institutional and organisational context. The paper uses a case study analysis of the British Library to explore the relationship between ICTs and new organisational forms. The paper highlights the need to go beyond the binary opposition of “bureaucratic” and “post-bureaucratic” forms. It also shows that

the bureaucratic context offers a more propitious environment for innovation than has been suggested by managerialist accounts of the “post-bureaucratic organization”.

Introduction

Martin Harris and Harro Ho¨pfl References Alvesson, M. and Thompson, P. (2005), “Post-Bureaucracy?”, in Ackroyd, S., Batt, R., Thompson, P. and Tolbert, P. (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Castells, M. (2000), The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, The Rise of the Network Society, I, Blackwell, Oxford. Clegg, S. (1990), Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Post-modern World, Sage, London. Cooper, R. and Burrell, G. (1988), “Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: an introduction”, Organization Studies, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 1-112. Greenwood, J. et al. (2002), New Public Administration in Britain, Routledge, London. Hood, C. (1998), The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1987), The End of Organized Capitalism, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. Reed, M. and Courpasson, D. (2004), “Introduction: special issue on bureaucracy in the age of enterprise”, Organization, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 5-12.

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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm

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Post-bureaucracy and Weber’s “modern” bureaucrat Harro M. Ho¨pfl Department of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a re-examination of the Weberian corpus. Design/methodology/approach – Discusses the Weberian corpus and the discrepancies and lacunae in Weber’s accounts. Outlines “Weberian” bureacracy in the post-bureacracy literature, the use and utility of ideal types and the problems of ideal typifications. Findings – The so-called “Weberian ideal type” which is the standard reference point in bureaucracy versus post-bureaucracy discussion is only ambiguously related to what Weber himself wrote. Usually “Weberian” bureaucracy is equated with rule-governed hierarchy. This is a gross over-simplification of Weber’s thought, but his “ideal type” demands radical re-tooling in order to be usable. The components he itemized and the importance he attached to them are inconsistent, they are abstracted from exemplars which Weber privileged without explanation, and he gave no unambiguous criteria for deciding which components this ideal type should include or exclude. Moreover, he equated bureaucratic organization with modernity, when on his own account there were fully bureaucratic organizations centuries before “modernity”. His ideal type thus cannot yield a clear distinction between bureaucratic and “post”-bureaucratic organizations, unless “bureaucracy” is flattened into “hierarchy”, and “post”-bureaucratic into “non-hierarchical”. But hierarchy cannot be eliminated from complex organizations, and bureaucracy can be re-theorized to include any non-contradictory attributes. Therefore, there can be adaptations of bureaucracy, but ex hypothesi there cannot be a “post-bureaucratic era”. Originality/value – The paper shows that Weber’s ideal type can be re-theorized to include any “non-contradictory attributes”. Keywords Bureaucracy, Sociology, History, Political philosophy Paper type Research paper

Journal of Organizational Change Management Vol. 19 No. 1, 2006 pp. 8-21 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810610643659

“Post-bureaucracy” is a concept used principally for two purposes. The first is to designate what commentators, “critical” as well as “orthodox”, agree are distinctive recent forms of organisation and management that undiscriminating ideas of “bureaucracy” cannot readily accommodate. The watch-words for these innovations are “project”, “mission”, “team”, “virtuality”, “network”, “alliances”, “information”, “knowledge” “horizontal”, “flexibility”, “adaptibility”, “empowerment”, “enterprise” etc. What is in dispute is not the existence of these “post-bureaucratic” forms of organisation and management, but how exactly they differ from bureaucratic forms, to what extent they are replacing them, and how they are to be characterized and judged (Alvesson and Thompson, 2005). The second purpose served by the employment of “post-bureaucracy” is to identify what some commentators consider to be fundamental changes not merely in organisation and management, but in the times we live in, perhaps the end of an era. The author would like to acknowledge gratefully the valuable help received with a draft version of this paper from two anonymous reviewers for JOCM.

The two employments of “post-bureaucracy” are not necessarily connected. Claims of the latter sort are more sensational, and are attractive in the study of organisation and management which relishes sweeping diagnoses of our world. Like the entire genre of “post-” or “late” concepts (post-modernism, post-Fordism, late-capitalism, late-modernity, post-colonial, post-industrial, post-feminist and all the rest), “post-bureaucracy” relies on the kind of periodisation that is highly usable from that point of view. The more aggressive formulations of the “end of bureaucracy” story, the favourite targets of more circumspect or sceptical commentators, invariably include Osborne and Gaebler (1993), a very readable polemic with an array of illustrations that should give pause to any enthusiast for bureaucracy, but scarcely an academic text; Heckscher (1994), an academic and careful theoretization of the post-bureaucratic ideal type; as well as Heydebrand, or Hydebrandt (1989), an earlier work by Clegg (1990), Barzelay (1992), Osborne and Plastrik (1998), management gurus like Peters (1992) and Handy (1996), and more recently and also much cited, Child and McGrath (2001). (A full array of citations is to be found in McSweeney in this issue.) Unguarded assertions about post-bureaucracy are, however, not the exclusive preserve of “orthodox” management theorists. Willmott’s (1993) polemic about the “totalitarianism” supposedly implicit in post-bureaucracy, and the interpretation of post-bureaucratic forms as “soft despotism” (Rose, 1999), are cases in point. But it is by now almost the conventional view that there is no simple, unilinear story to be told about bureaucracy being superseded by post-bureaucracy. The concept of “hybridity” is one attractive way of acknowledging that things are not quite what they were in western organisation and management (Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). But what sort of story should replace “post-bureaucratic” hyperbole? No attempt to provide such a story is made here. What follows is some reflections prompted by the endemic habit of definition and re-definition which is such a conspicuous feature of post-bureaucracy/bureaucracy discussions. Any idea of post-bureaucracy self-evidently presupposes bureaucracy, and perhaps also “non-bureaucracy” and “pre-bureaucracy”. By common consent, the fons et origo and the point of reference here is Max Weber, although his account of bureaucracy is perhaps more often invoked than studied. Revisiting the Weberian corpus shows that any attempt to identify some new or “post” form of organisation with his thought as the point of reference is bound to be as inconclusive as denials that anything has “really” changed. Weber’s accounts The Weberian corpus contains two general treatments of bureaucracy. Both are in the posthumous and incomplete Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society, henceforth WG) published in 1922. The short version (WG, Pt I, Ch. 3, ss. 3-5), a kind of prescriptive glossary but with some substantive discussion, was a revised manuscript of c. 1918, locating bureaucracy in the context of “rational” or “legal” Herrschaft, that is, rule or government[1]. A much fuller, but unrevised and unfinished earlier discussion without any context (WG, Pt III, Ch. 6) was written according to his editors between 1910 and 1914. (For datings see Mommsen, 1974, p. 16, fn. 22, and Keith Tribe’s introduction to Hennis, 1988, pp. 12-13.) Among other things, it seeks to distinguish between “modern” bureaucracy and earlier types of administration (which Weber also frequently called “bureaucracies”), and also discusses the preconditions,

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features, and some of the broader consequences of bureaucracy – the phenomenon, not the ideal type. Weber also addressed aspects of the topic in Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland (Parliament and Government in the new order in Germany) of 1918, Politik als Beruf (The Profession and Vocation of Politics) from 1918 to1919, and in passing elsewhere (Sica, 2000, pp. 52-6). These writings are less convoluted and more polemical than Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, but the same material and even the same expressions often reappear. All these accounts read bureaucracy as having the following attributes, listed here in no order of significance, and with no suggestion of connectedness: . “All rule (Herrschaft) over a multiplicity of people normally (but not absolutely always) requires a staff of administrators”, reliably executing the general ordinances and specific commands of the Herrschaft (WG, p. 123) or leader, director (Leiter, p. 26). Bureaucracy is the modern manner of securing their orderly, routine, day-to-day execution (p. 650). . It is characterised by strict hierarchy: delimited “jurisdictions” (Kompetenzen) and resources are assigned from the top to officials and offices. Hierarchy in this sense is constitutive of modern bureaucracy (WG, pp. 125, 650, 655-6). It involves a highly-articulated division of labour, and strict and uniform discipline and control over the personnel. . This hierarchy is “monocratic” (pp. 128, 650); i.e. its apex is one person, not a college. . Both the organisation and the conduct of business of bureaucracies are straff (a favourite term, e.g. pp. 128-9, 642, 656-7, 659-61), that is: taut, tight, ram-rod straight (like the bearing of soldiers on parade). . Officials are grouped into Beho¨rden, that is, bureaux, departments, agencies, sections, or ministries (pp. 125, 650). . Bureaucracy means subjection to impersonal rules (pp. 126, 651, 662), requiring officials to treat their “subjects” impersonally, sine ira et studio (one of Weber’s absolutely favourite expressions), and without respect to persons or status (pp. 129, 662). This is contrasted with the “material” justice, sometimes “Khadi-justice”, practiced by earlier and other administrations (WG, pp. 157, 468, 486, 663), and still expected by democrats. These rules also govern recruitment and advancement (and demotion or dismissal, rarely mentioned, e.g. p. 127), in accordance with impersonal criteria. . Professional qualifications and knowledge (Fachwissen) are of the essence of bureaucracy. Officials owe their positions, at least in the “most rational case”, to examinations and diplomas certifying their professional qualification (WG, pp. 126-7, 129, 676), which are constantly increasing in importance in all bureaucracies. Equally, status and authority depend upon the official’s professional expertise. Elsewhere, however, he asserted that Britain (England), France and America had either wholly or in large measure done without formal examinations, except for admission to the civil service (WG, p. 675). . Officials are selected (Ernennung, “nomination”) by their superiors, not elected (pp. 127, 653).

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Promotion is by “next in line” (aufru¨cken) and not merit, and salaries relate to status, not to performance, at least if bureaucrats have their way (pp. 127, 654-5, 676). Bureaucratic jobs are for life, and carry a right to a pension and some security against arbitrary dismissal (pp. 127, 654, 676). The keeping of records (Akten, files) is decisive (pp. 126, 651); for Weber this was not, however, emblematic of blind addiction of routine, the colloquial connotation of “bureaucracy” (or “red tape”), but as critical to the “rationality” and “efficiency” of bureaucracy as an instrument of power (Machtmittel ) for rulers and employers (p. 677). The remuneration of officials is fixed, and is “normally” in the form of salaries, which for some reason were described as not an essential part of the concept of bureaucracy (begriffswesentlich, p. 127). Officials have no independent status or income, and office does not become property; Weber relished the analogy between officials being progressively separated from ownership of the “means of administration” (Verwaltungsmittel ), and workers – in Marxian fashion – being separated from the means of production (pp. 127, 665). Great importance attaches to official secrets and secretiveness (pp. 129, 671-3; Weber, 1920, p. 187): “bureaucracy hides what it knows and does from criticism” (WG, p. 671). This point is hardly ever referred to in the secondary literature. Bureaucratic administration is increasingly characteristic of private, commercial, industrial, charitative, ecclesiastical, military and any other large organisations, political parties, trade unions, etc. (WG, pp. 127, 654-5, 665-6; Weber, 1920, p. 140). Only the capitalist entrepreneur is superior to state bureaucrats in terms of professional and factual knowledge (WG, p. 129).

Discrepancies and lacunae in Weber’s accounts The most obvious conclusion from all this is that, as it stands, Weber’s account of bureaucracy is unusable as a reference point for identifying post-bureaucracy. This is not because Weber’s concern is for the most part with governmental bureaucracies, or organisations whose close involvement with the state encouraged them to parallel its structure, such as political parties, large industries, enterprises, banks and universities, and not with organisation in general. Public sector organisations are among the chief concerns and illustrations of “post-bureaucracy”. A more fundamental difficulty is the absence in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft of connective tissue linking together the various “components” of bureaucracy, and the lack of prioritisation among them, despite the proliferation of headings, numbered paragraphs, sub-paragraphs and Sperrschrift (equivalent to italics). An informal summary in “Parliament and Government in Germany” in 1918 is equally unmethodical: [T]he . . . unequivocal criterion for the modernisation of the state [since the Middle Ages] has been progress towards a bureaucratic officialdom (bu¨rokratisches Beamtentum) based on appointment (Anstellung; i.e. not birth), salary, pension, promotion [?}, professional training, firmly established areas of responsibility, procedures reliant on keeping files (Aktenma¨ssigkeit), hierarchical structures of superiority and subordination (Weber, 1994, pp. 145-6, slightly modified; German version p. 140).

There are substantial discrepancies and variations between the different accounts, even regarding what is “essential”, or definitive of the ideal typical bureaucracy. The later

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account (WG, pp. 126-7), for example, emphasised that civil servants (Beamten) are personally free, and contractually engaged, with a right to terminate the contract by resignation. Indeed Weber there described the contractual character of bureaucratic employment as being of the essence (wesentlich) of modern bureaucracy. In the earlier account, its contractual character was almost denied: “it is not a mere exchange of performances for money, like the free contract of labour” (pp. 651-2). Instead, the job of civil servant is there described as a Beruf (a “vocation and profession”; see Speirs’s comments on Beruf in Weber, 1994, p. 372) and a matter of duty (Pflichtcharakter), a duty of loyalty to the office (Amtstreuepflicht, p. 652); there is a sense of the honour due to one’s stand, i.e. social standing (Standesehrgefu¨hl, p. 657), so that the Beamter is prepared to subordinate himself unconditionally (literally: devoid of any will, willensloseste) to his superior (p. 657). However, Weber’s account is often simply in terms of personal and group self-interest: bureaucracy is a “machinery that runs on ceaselessly” (p. 669), and continues to function impeccably even with changes of leader or regime; its members are “chained”, or “welded to it” (the mixed metaphors are Weber’s) by both self-interest and habit. The later account only mentioned Pflicht (duty) in passing (p. 129). The few opaque lines here devoted to the Formalismus and the “material-utilitarian” ethic of bureaucrats (WG, p. 130) have no parallel in the earlier one. Again, in his earlier account but not the later one Weber saw discipline – for him an indispensable characteristic of bureaucracy and a simple implicate of hierarchy – as arising from military discipline, “the womb of discipline in general” for bureaucracy (itself “the most rational child of discipline”, WG, p. 642) as for all large organisations (Grossbetriebe). The latter are, however, also “great educators in discipline” (WG, p. 647). Why he recognised no religious provenance or aura for the duty, honour and discipline of the bureaucrat (unlike the capitalist) is unclear (though see the allusion to exercitia spiritualia in WG, p. 643). I comment on this later. Weber was also indecisive on the connection between bureaucracy and modern means of communication, describing them as essential (wesentlich) (WG, p. 129), but in the earlier version merely as pacemakers (Schrittmacher, p. 660). He treated the telephone, telegraph, postal services and railways (no mention of motor vehicles, or even of typewriters or carbon paper) merely as crucial aids to efficiency, whereas there were capitalist private enterprises, such as Sears Roebuck operating with enormous success from the 1880s, which were inconceivable without modern means of communication; the same could be said of every “modern” social service bureaucracy and the military. All Weber’s accounts hinge on the technical, professional knowledge of the bureaucrat (Fachwissen). He proved prophetic about the growing significance of professional (paper, academic) qualifications in all organisations. However, he was not unambiguous about what exactly that bureaucratic “knowledge” was. He acknowledged the importance of practical experience (WG, p. 129: “Fachwissen und Tatsachenkenntnis”; p. 674). But the earlier piece stressed tertiary level educational qualifications (WG, p. 676), principally in law and “administrative science”, or Kontorwissenschaft in commercial enterprises (p. 651). According to Weber, “education-certificates” are valued as much for the bureaucrat’s social standing as for any professional utility; indeed he saw them as evidence of bureaucracy becoming an “estate” (p. 676), and of “plutocratisation” (p. 129), in view of the wealth needed to acquire them (p. 676). Social status, security of tenure, a pension and, under pressure

from the bureaucracy, orderly disciplinary proceedings (p. 676) compensate for the generally lower level of salaries compared to private employment (p. 654), a point not made in the later discussion. Even Weber’s choice of term to designate his subject matter was peculiar. “Bureaucracy” was an ironic analogy to “aristocracy” or “democracy”: “rule by bureaux”; the job of bureaux, after all, is not to rule but to administer, that is, to serve. It became common parlance from the early nineteenth century onwards (Krygier, 1979), and has always retained its pejorative connotation in all European languages. But then, pace du Gay (2000), although Weber was certainly not writing an indictment of bureaucracy, neither was his portrait a legitimation, or even particularly sympathetic. It was only in 1918-1919, when confronted with the Munich Ra¨terepublik and the absurdities of Marxist and Socialist claims about the dispensability of bureaucracy that the worth and the “ethical” aspects of the civil servant’s “calling” came into focus for Weber. He now contrasted it with that of the vocational politician on the one side, and the street politics of “sterile excitement” (“Aufgeregtsein”, roughly equivalent to our “being hyper”) and “personality” of students, revolutionaries and other “parasites” (“Schmarotzer”, Weber, 1920, p. 345) on the other. Even so, a page in “Politik als Beruf” (Weber, 1994, pp. 330-1) on the ethos of bureaucracy, the ideal of public service or stern devotion to impersonal dutifulness is all there is in the entire Weberian corpus that is not purely en passant. Until then, he had been as much or more interested in the way bureaucrats advanced their own material interests, especially in power (Machtinteresse), in their “sure instincts about the conditions for maintaining [their] power”, at the expense of other parts of the body politic, and in the bureaucracy’s power and indispensability even vis-a`-vis its supposed “masters” (e.g. WG, pp. 129, 664, 671-3). The other polemical target of the earlier discussion was the naiveties and unwillingness to embrace formal principles of justice of various unspecified “democrats” (especially WG, pp. 662-5). “Weberian” bureaucracy in the post-bureaucracy literature In sum, Weber’s discussions of bureaucracy have a variable content, and some fixed points. The so-called “Weberian” ideal type in the bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy literature is a construct of later writers, involving drastic pruning and grafting. It ignores even what Weber explicitly designated as decisive, if for example, it appears to be peculiar to governmental bureaucracies, or to Prussia (Hales, 2002, p. 52). So Heckscher’s summary is: . . . the major concepts [defining bureaucracy] articulated by Weber are the same ones still used by most managers in their conscious planning: rationality, accountability, and hierarchy; . . . for Weber, perhaps the central concept was the differentiation of person from office . . . the key to bureaucracy is the rational definition of offices (Heckscher, 1994, p. 19; see also the useful schematic outline in Hodgson, 2004, p. 84).

The differentiation of person from office is, ironically, also the feature of Weberian bureaucracy singled out by “anti-post-bureaucracy” theorists such as du Gay and Kallinikos. Walton (2005, p. 572), surveying the literature on organisation and management, sees the “widely studied” variables of differentiation, standardisation, decentralisation and formalisation as the “primary characteristics in Weber’s model of bureaucratic control”. More informal invocations of Weber’s authority are even more

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ready to add and subtract items as convenient, sometimes with explicit acknowledgment (Hales, 2002, pp. 52-4) and sometimes not. Thus Ritzer (1996, pp. 17-121) imputes to Weberian bureaucracy the “four components of formal rationality: efficiency, predictability, quantification and control through the substitution of non-human for human technology” (p. 20). The last two components are not Weber; efficiency is not a component of rationality; and the Nazi corpse-factories Ritzer cites, as well as the Communist ones he ignores, are not remotely “realisations” (Ritzer, p. 21) of Weber’s worst fears about bureaucracy, or his “iron cage of rationality”(du Gay, 2000, p. 49). Selective reception and appropriation aside, the “basic principles of bureaucracy” imputed to Weber (e.g. Maravelias, p. 551) are in effect simply the components of any hierarchical arrangement, with the addition of Weber’s insistence that in “modern” bureaucracy the whole is governed by abstract rules, in other words the rule of law. All this together is “the central feature of bureaucracy” for Alvesson and Thompson’s (2005, p. 491) valuable survey. Fayol (1999) offered a much more methodical interpretation of administration as hierarchy, and also dealt with organisations in general, but his work has not been imbued with the authority later attributed to Weber. The use and utility of ideal types In discussing bureaucracy, Weber was in part developing an ideal type, although he also engaged in sociological interpretation of, and political commentary on, actual bureaucracies. The subject of ideal types warrants discussion at book-length, but some comments are nonetheless necessary here. Weber made clear what he did not mean by an ideal type. It is a construct, a composition, an abstraction, and not a “mirroring” or “representation” that captures the essence or totality of some reality (Weber, 1951, e.g. pp. 190, 193). For Weber that is impossible, and typifies Marxist and positivist reification. For him the only irreducible reality is the infinite, meaningless multiplicity of facts. It is only an interpreting intelligence that abstracts from that multiplicity features which it, and not reality itself, designates as essential, defining, wesentlich, from some point of view (Weber, 1951, esp. pp. 190-205). Nor is an ideal type a re´sume´ of the features common to all bureaucracies: this would presuppose the possibility of unproblematic identification of bureaucracies in the world, in which case ideal typification would be unnecessary. Nor (obviously) is a Weberian ideal type a dictionary definition, or mere stipulation. But he produced only sketchy and allusive explanations as to how the method and logic of ideal typification might actually work. He described them as a kind of “utopia” (Wissenschaftslehre, p. 190), which is unhelpful given the absence of agreement about the nature and value (if any) of utopias (Lasky, 1976; Logan, 1983). More significantly, ideal types are “one-sided accentuations” of certain features of reality (Wissenschaftslehre, p. 191), and Weber gave heuristic utility and absence of internal self-contradiction as the criteria for judging them (e.g. p. 190). However, any conception of anything can be rendered free of contradictions by simply removing them. The decisive criterion is, therefore, the “heuristic utility” of Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy. Problems of ideal typifications Two decisive features detract from the heuristic utility of Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy: the first is essentially methodological and pertains to the logic of its

construction; the second is substantive, relating to the periodisation inherent in it. The latter will be treated below. Methodology The Weberian corpus does not yield any criteria for deciding which features an ideal type of bureaucracy should properly include or exclude. Nor does it provide any justification for his singling out some features as essential, or in the nature of bureaucracy, and others not. His work does nothing to explain, either, how ideal types are abstracted. Given his epistemological position (which again cannot be discussed here, but see Turner and Factor (1994) and Eliaeson (2002)), Weber could not, and did not, claim to be eliciting an ideal type from an examination of “the facts” of bureaucracy,. But he presents the ideal type of bureaucracy as if it results from a historically rigorous distinction between genus and species. So bureaucracy is the species, more precisely the distinctively “modern” species, of the genus administration. But Weber’s examinations of historical administrative forms already presuppose an identification of “administration”, and therefore, Herrschaft. In other words, they already presuppose some more or less elaborated theory, which specific examples of administrations could only refine but not generate. That theory, as Hennis (1988) has rightly concluded, is in fact a political theory (in my view a theory of institutional architecture, of the same genre as Machiavelli’s, Harrington’s and Montesquieu’s theories of republics and monarchies, or Tocqueville’s democracy). But Weber himself did not articulate it, or regard articulating it in this connection as essential. Nevertheless an ideal type is not a check-list, but a theory. Abstracting from what? Weber’s choice of paradigm instances of bureaucracy. An ideal type of bureaucracy, then, is an “abstraction”, and in effect a theory. But it cannot be abstracted from nothing in particular, and it must be a theory of something. “One-sided accentuation” of features actually present in reality, again, demands a reality whose features are to be accentuated. Weber’s paradigm or model instance of a bureaucratic reality was transparently post-Bismarckian Germany, albeit with earlier Prussian allusions. It is not modelled on, say, the British civil service after the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, or the overblown bureaucracies which developed in nineteenth century France (Krygier, 1979). Weber’s claim (e.g. WG, p. 128) that “monocratic” rule reliant on documentation (aktenma¨ssig) is superseding rule by “colleges” elevates a distinctively Prussian administrative reform into a feature of the ideal type: the civil service co-ordination of British ministries, for example, was and remains “collegial”. Equally Prussian was his emphasis on the significance of professional qualifications in bureaucracies. He meant formal academic qualifications in law, the Juristenmonopol, but also in various disciplines unheard of in Britain, France and America and (for all I know), the Latin countries. Verwaltungswissenschaft, designating what had been taught in German universities since the eighteenth century as Kameralistik, had absolutely no British equivalent. University politics courses devised in Britain for imperial administrators in the later nineteenth century (Collini et al., 1983, Chapter 11) were resolutely humanistic and philosophical in orientation. Weber also spoke persistently, and puzzlingly, of the “pure”, “purest”, or even “most rational” (WG, pp. 126-7) instances of bureaucracy, and its “most developed” or “modern” form; he described it as “a late product of development” (WG, p. 677). But why should Prussia exemplify all this, rather than, say, Britain or France, or for that

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matter Russia? Weber’s choice of exemplars of bureaucracy necessarily restricted what his ideal type could include and exclude: what one can find depends on where one looks. Most students of organisation are familiar with the notion that there are more varieties of hierarchy and variations within hierarchy than Weber allowed. He, for example, said nothing about the “shape” of the bureaucratic pyramid (apart from at the “monocratic” apex). It could have many “layers” or few, and all manner of relationships are possible between and within its layers. Equally, the co-ordination of different offices into a single department, or of different departments and organs into a single state apparatus need not be “monocratic”. Again, there are many attributes of bureaucracy that do not feature in Weber’s ideal type. He did not, for example, consider the extant legitimations of bureaucracies, which in Germany were no doubt ultimately built on the rock of Hegel’s description of bureaucracy as the “universal class”. Committed as he was to an interpretative understanding of human conduct, it is strange that Weber saw no significance in how bureaucracies presented themselves to the world, and indeed to themselves: for example, letterheads, emblems, seals, bureaucratic architecture, or – since he claimed that bureaucracy pervaded all “modern” organisation – the architecture and art of commerce. He took no notice even of bureaucratic nomenclatures and modes of address: consider for instance the pregnant title secretaries (whence Geheimrat, “Permanent Secretary”, Secretariat, etc.), etymologically someone entrusted with, or capable of keeping, a secret. But symbolism of any kind was not Weber’s strongest point in any case. Do symbolism and legitimation, then, not belong in an ideal type of bureaucracy. If not, why not? Lacunae like these might have become apparent with a different choice of paradigmatic examples against which to measure his ideal type. An ideal type cannot of course be refuted by “the facts”, since it is not a mirror or representation of some phenomenon. But its heuristic utility, sensitizing us to what requires investigation, might have been, or may be, improved by such amplification. Weber’s periodizations For Weber and those who cite him as their authority, hierarchy is the sine qua non of bureaucracy. Conversely, the apparent absence or attenuation of hierarchical features in some kinds of organisation is the principal reason for postulating post-bureaucracy. Now, the theological and ecclesiastical derivation of “hierarchy” is written on its face: literally, a government of priests (hieros and arkhe´). Nonetheless, Weber almost completely neglected ecclesiastical orders as a paradigm example or comparator for any conception of bureaucracy. A possible explanation, at any rate coherent with Weber’s philosophy of history, is that he was equating bureaucracy stricto sensu with modernity, and the church (here meaning the catholic church) was not for him an illustration of modernity. Bureaucracy, however, is for Weber the modern species of administration and it, together with modern Herrschaft and even modern industry, compose the personae in Weber’s majestic drama of modernity, with rationality, rationalisation or rationalism (used interchangeably) as its defining theme. Rationality or rationalisation for Weber means principally the calculative adaptation of means to independently formulated ends. His famous ideal typical trinity of types of Herrschaft relies on an infelicitous distinction between “legal-rational” and “traditional” authority, where tradition unsubtly means custom blindly followed. His main claim for

bureaucracy is precisely its “rationality”, as opposed to “earlier” forms of administration, which relied to a greater or lesser extent on customary practice and entitlements to office – this is what his much-invoked distinction between person and office in bureaucracy meant. Bureaucracy has a rational character: rules, ends, means, attention to the matter at hand [sachlich, also connoting “unemotional”, “dispassionate”, as opposed to emotional engagement] and impersonality govern the way it conducts itself (WG, p. 677).

Its “purely technical superiority” makes its forward march (WG, pp. 128-9, 660, 662, 671-3; Weber, 1920, p. 152) into ever larger areas of collective life almost inescapable (unentrinnbar, “inexorable”, “fated”; Weber, 1920, p. 150). His equation of rationality (which is part of the ideal typical identification) with the efficiency of bureaucracy (which is not, and cannot be an ideal typical characteristic) is of course supremely problematic, but beyond the scope of this paper. It is the theme of modernity and the implicit periodizations in Weber’s account of bureaucracy that give rise to significant incoherences. To distinguish bureaucracy from “earlier” forms and to describe it as a “late product of development”, is not merely to set out different ideal types which may be, and demonstrably are, exemplified in administrations existing simultaneously. It is also (in the manner of nineteenth century sociology and anthropology) to distinguish “stages of historical development”. From there it is merely one further step to postulate “post-bureaucracy”: pre-bureaucracy, bureaucracy, post-bureaucracy. There is, however, no need whatever to equate ideal types with chronological sequences, as even some of the best work following Weber still does (e.g. Maravelias, Kallinikos, du Gay), and there are many compelling reasons for not doing so. Weber’s identification of bureaucracy with modernity is, moreover, unsustainable, as evidence he himself provided shows. Nothing could be more “rational” and systematic than the hierocratic conception of the church as a papal monarchy (dealt with allusively by Weber in WG, Pt. II, Ch. XI). In so far as the distinction between person and office is regarded as a decisive characteristic of bureaucracy, it too was utterly conventional in the church. Weber himself described the medieval church as “a unitary rational organisation with a monarchical apex and centralised control of piety”, the pope being an “inner-worldly ruler (Herrscher) with a stupendous plenitude of power (ungeheurer Machtfu¨lle) and [the Church having] the capacity for active regulation of lives”, unlike the eastern religions, which lack “the tautness (Straffheit, cf. above) of a bureaucratic organisation” (WG, p. 318; see also pp. 655, 658, 668). He also noted the medieval systematisation of charity, preaching and jurisdiction over heretics of the Franciscans and Dominicans, describing them as Betriebe serving “rational purposes in the service of the hierarchy” (WG, p. 318). So the papal church and various of its organs were already rational and bureaucratic in the middle ages. So was the inquisition, whose most salient characteristic was not to sadism, but addiction to routine, records and due process (Kamen, 1998). An equally striking illustration of the “non-modern” character of “Weberian” bureaucracy is the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. Its founders in 1539 self-consciously patterned their own organisation, a most rigorously and systematically hierarchical structure (Ganss, 1991), on an ideal image of papal hierocracy. Furthermore, the organising principles of this society were indifferent to anything except suitability as

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“means” to the “ends” of the society; Jesuits invariably thought in these categories. The relationship between the society and each member, moreover, was expressly construed as contractual. (For a full account see Ho¨pfl, 2004, Ch. 2.) In short, every aspect of Weberian bureaucracy and rationality is precisely paralleled in the Society of Jesus. The mentality and motivation, the passions and the interests that were to animate the members of the society were, furthermore, explored with enormous subtlety in the society’s own writings; they might without too much exaggeration be described as an “innerworldly asceticism” (Ho¨pfl, 2000). Weber himself referred to the askesis of the Jesuits (now entirely stripped of its old anti-hygienic elements) as the “perfected rational discipline for the Church’s purposes” (WG, p. 318, further comments pp. 643, 790). Of course the society was a “total institution”, albeit one always noted for the independence in thought and action of its members. But then the “office” has always intruded deeply into the private lives of senior civil servants, and for that matter executives of all large organisations, and any organisation aiming at permanence, even a university, will be a “normalizing machine” (Rose, 1999). In sum, bureaucracy was not ( pace Hales, 2002, p. 52) an “emerging form of organisation” in Weber’s time. Exemplary bureaucratic organizations and their theorizations were by then centuries old. From before 1100 AD onwards, hierocrats, defenders of papal authority against emperors and conciliarists, developed fully articulated conceptions of hierarchy (equated with Order, for which see Greenleaf, 1964); at the apex of the ecclesiastical hierarchy stands the pope, with plenitudo potestatis, plenitude of authority, including authority to appoint and direct all those lower down the hierarchy, within the limits of divine, natural and canon law. Weber noted in passing (WG, p. 668) various episodes in the definition of papal monarchy and hierarchy. Holy Roman Emperors and subsequently “absolute” princes claimed for themselves an authority analogous to that of the Papacy, and eventually papal authority itself. They may even have borrowed models for their administrations from there; they certainly freely borrowed ecclesiastics, for the good Weberian reason that they were better-educated and more reliable than nobles. The appropriation of papal plenitudo potestatis by theorists of “sovereignty” (i.e. the early modern European theory of Herrschaft) is evident enough. All this is obviously not an argument against Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy, still less against ideal typification as a method, but against conflating ideal typification and periodicity. The upshot: post-bureaucracy and the Weberian ideal type It has been argued in this paper that Weber provided no way of determining which features of bureaucracy his ideal type properly included, excluded or ignored. This defect of his method is replicated whenever bureaucracy, or post-bureaucracy, is identified by means of bullet-points or check-lists. Weber leaves us with nothing in the way of connective tissue with which to bind together the features of his ideal type, and the latter may thus contain any conceivable assemblage of possible features, provided they are not logically self-contradictory. And without a clear conception of bureaucracy, “post-bureaucracy” is indistinguishable. The best work in the bureaucracy/post-bureaucracy literature supplies Weberian bureaucracy with precisely such a theory. What is needed is some more sophisticated way of relating the organisation to the members whose conduct is shaped by it (Maravelias, 2003, p. 551). This requires, among other things, some conception of

motivation. Weber himself, without developing the point, treated motivation in bureaucrats in terms of “interests”, that is to say incentives and sanctions, material, emotional or spiritual, which bureaucracy dovetails with the allocation and co-ordination of tasks. It is this that makes bureaucracy “efficient” or “rational” from a “purely technical point of view” (WG, p. 660), that is reliable and predictable from the point of view of governors (WG, p. 659). More sensitive and sophisticated conceptions of motivation and of the organisation-individual relationship than this are conceivable. But irrespective of what account is offered, relations of command and obedience, control and compliance, authority and acknowledgement of authority, and specialisation of tasks – in sum, hierarchy – are intrinsic to relations between human beings organised into any but the smallest and/or most ephemeral of collective undertakings. Whoever says organisation says hierarchy, to coin a phrase. An entirely non- or post-bureaucratic organisation without hierarchy is simply inconceivable. So, if “Weberian bureaucracy” is equated in the old way with hierarchy, elements of bureaucracy are bound to be found in any organisation. It will also be easy enough to identify non-bureaucratic (i.e. non-hierarchical) elements. But why invoke Weber for this, when his ideal type of bureaucracy certainly encompasses much more than merely hierarchy? However, bureaucracy may be conceptualised in ways that go well beyond merely theorizing one sort of hierarchy or another. du Gay and Kallinikos have provided elegant examples of this. Such revised conceptions of bureaucracy can accommodate organisational innovations of the most diverse kinds, sometimes positively counter-intuitively from Weber’s perspective. But if bureaucracy is inherently flexible, for example, and is compatible with all manner of different arrangements, then what have been diagnosed as “post-bureaucratic” arrangements must appear as merely variants within bureaucracy. Equally, if bureaucracy distinguishes persons and roles, and if “post-bureaucratic” arrangements in effect do the same, what has been seen as post- or non-bureaucracy again becomes merely a variant of bureaucracy: total “control” or “domination” of individuals by organizations is impossible even in Arendtian totalitarian regimes, and certainly does not occur in supposedly “post-bureaucratic” modes of organisation where some have claimed to find it (Maravelias, 2003). In the light of all this, it is not surprising that bureaucracy/post-bureaucracy discussions have generally concluded that both bureaucracy and “modernity” continue, albeit not quite as we have known them. Given this point of reference, the advent of “post-bureaucracy” would require either the complete disappearance of hierarchies, which is inconceivable, or the identification of some arrangements as inherently incompatible with bureaucracy, and it hard to see how this could be shown. Weberian periodisation meanwhile continues unabated and, with rare exceptions such as McSweeney (in this issue), largely un-interrogated. Note 1. Often translated as “domination”, which in ordinary English carries irremovable connotations of tyranny or oppression. But for Weber it was merely a term for ruling (Lassman and Speirs, 1994, Glossary). Herrscher was his most usual personal substantive from it, but he often used the etymologically prior Herr; both terms were deliberate archaisms, the latter sometimes with Weber’s undecidable inverted commas. Mommsen’s

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rationale for rendering Herrschaft as “domination” (1974, p. 72, fn. 1) depends on a strange reading of how “authority” functions in modern English; Weber’s translators Roth and Wittich also use “domination”, but revert to “authority” in Ch.III.3. References Alvesson, M. and Thompson, P. (2005), “Postbureaucracy”, in Stephen, A. et al. (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Barzelay, M. (1992), Breaking through Bureaucracy, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Child, J. and McGrath, R. (2001), “Organizations unfettered: organisational form in an information intensive economy”, The Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 44 No. 6, pp. 1135-48. Clegg, S. (1990), Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Post-modern World, Sage, London. Clegg, S. and Courpasson, D. (2004), “Political hybrids: Tocquevillian views on project organizations”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 41 No. 4, pp. 525-47. Collini, S., Welch, D. and Burrow, J. (1983), That Noble Science of Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. du Gay, P. (2000), In Praise of Bureaucracy, Sage, London. Eliaeson, S. (2002), Max Weber’s Methodologies, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. Fayol, H. (1999), Administration industrielle et ge´ne´rale, Dunod, Paris. Ganss, G.E. (Ed.) (1991), Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, Institute of Jesuit Sources, St Louis, MO. Greenleaf, W.H. (1964), Order, Empiricism and Politics, Oxford University Press, London. Hales, C. (2002), “‘Bureaucracy-lite’ and continuities in managerial work”, British Journal of Management, Vol. 13, pp. 51-66. Handy, C. (1996), Beyond Certainty: The Changing Worlds of Organizations, Arrow, London. Heckscher, C. (1994), “Defining the post-bureaucratic type”, in Heckscher, C. and Donnellon, A. (Eds), The Post-bureaucratic Organization: New Perspectives on Organizational Change, Chapter 2, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 14-62. Hennis, W. (1988), Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, Allen and Unwin, London, trans. Keith Tribe. Hodgson, D.E. (2004), “Project work: the legacy of bureaucratic control in the post-bureaucratic organization”, Organisation, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 81-100. Ho¨pfl, H. (2000), “Ordered passions: hierarchy and commitment in the organisational ideas of the Jesuit founders”, Management Learning, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 313-29. Ho¨pfl, H. (2004), Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c.1540-1630, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Hydebrandt, W. (1989), “New organizational forms”, Work and Occupations, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 323-57. Kamen, H. (1998), The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Krygier, M. (1979), “State and bureaucracy in Europe: the growth of a concept”, in Kamenka, E. and Krygier, M. (Eds), Bureaucracy: The Career of a Concept, Edward Arnold, London. Lasky, M.J. (1976), Utopia and Revolution, Macmillan, London. Logan, G.M. (1983), The Meaning of More’s “Utopia”, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Maravelias, C. (2003), “Post-bureaucracy – control through professional freedom”, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 16 No. 5, pp. 547-66. Mommsen, W. (1974), Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1992), Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, Plume, NewYork, NY. Osborne, David, Plastrik and Peter (1998), Banishing Bureucracy: The Firve Strategies for Reinventing Government, Plume, NewYork, NY. Peters, T. (1992), Liberation Management, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Ritzer, G. (1996), The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Rose, N. (1999), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Sica, A. (2000), “Rationalisation and culture”, in Turner, S. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Weber, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 42-58. Turner, S. and Factor, R.A. (1994), Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker, Routledge, London. Walton, E.J. (2005), “The persistence of bureaucracy: a meta-analysis of Weber’s model of bureaucratic control”, Organization Studies, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 569-600. Weber, M. (1951) in Winckelmann, J. (Ed.), Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 2nd ed., J.C.B. Mohr, Tu¨bingen. Weber, M. (1994), “Weber: political writings Lassman”, in Peter, Speirs and Ronald (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, German texts in Weber, M. 1920, Politische Schriften (electronic version of the 1920 edition) available at: www.uni-potsdam.de/u/paed/ Flitner/Flitner/Weber/PS.rtf Willmott, H. (1993), “Ignorance is strength, slavery is freedom: managing culture in modern organisation”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 512-52. Further reading Clegg, S. (2005), “Puritans, visionaries and survivors’”, Organization Studies, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 527-45. Courpasson, D. and Reed, M. (2004), “Introduction: bureaucracy in the age of enterprise”, Organisation, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 5-12. Kallinikos, J. (2004), “The social foundations of bureaucratic order: bureaucracy and its alternatives in the age of contingency”, Organization, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 13-36. Weber, M. (1947), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 3rd ed. (unaltered reprint of the 2nd edition of 1925), 2, J.C.B. Mohr, Tubingen, “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland” (Parliament and Government in the new order in Germany), 1918, and “Politik als Beruf” (The Profession and Vocation of Politics), 1919, both translated in Lassman Peter and Speirs, Ronald (1994), Weber: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; German texts in Weber, M. (1920), Politische Schriften (electronic version of the 1920 edition) available at: www.uni-potsdam.de/u/paed/Flitner/ Flitner/Weber/PS.rtf

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Are we living in a post-bureaucratic epoch? Brendan McSweeney

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School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK Abstract Purpose – According to an extensive and growing literature, we are in the twilight of bureaucracy. The labels applied to the supposed new organizational form include: post-bureaucratic; post-modern; post-hierarchical; and the virtual organisation. The purpose of this paper is to consider the various claims for “epochal” change by evaluating the supporting and contrary evidence. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on evidence on the reform of the UK Civil Service over the last few decades to show the intensification of bureaucracy. Findings – The paper takes issue with the “epochalist” visions of sudden transformation which have underpinned much of the comment on post-bureaucracy, arguing that the concept of post-bureaucracy is analytically blind to the diversity and complexity of contemporary organizational change. Originality/value – Locating the debate on post-bureaucracy in the broader political economy of Neo-Conservatism reveals an authoritarian dimension which has been absent from most commentaries. Keywords Bureaucracy, Civil service, Postmodernism, Organizational change, United Kingdom Paper type Research paper

Preamble Since the early-1980s, a growing literature in a range of management sub-disciplines has asserted that the age of bureaucracy has ended or is ending. It is said that there has been a “paradigm shift”; a “fundamental transformation”; “a profound shift”; “a startling evolution”; a “profound break” – that we live in a new organizational “age”, “era” or “epoch”. “What is going on”, it is said, is “fundamental: a move beyond bureaucracy” (Heckscher, 1998, p. 2). As Maravelias (2003, p. 547) states: In recent years an increasing number of studies have pointed to the demise of the bureaucratic organization and the emergence of a new post-bureaucratic organization

.Whilst “post-bureaucratic” is one of the most widely used labels for the supposed new organizational type, other terms are also employed in the same sense, including: “post-hierarchical”; “the post-modern organization”; “the virtual corporation”; “the cellular form”; and the “boundaryless corporation”. Castells (1996, p. 164), for example, speaks of the “horizontal corporation” which is “a network of self-programmed, self-directed units based on decentralization”. Constant in this literature is a “discourse of ending”, a belief in the “epochal” termination of bureaucracy (Kamarck, 2002, 2003; Child and Rodrigues, 2002; Child and McGrath, 2001; Ashkenas et al., 1998; Miles et al., 1997; Dent, 1995; Heckscher, Journal of Organizational Change Management Vol. 19 No. 1, 2006 pp. 22-37 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810610643668

The comments of Mats Alvesson, Jane Davison, Sheila Duncan, Martin Harris, Harro Ho¨pfl, Bill Ryan, Prem Sikka, two anonymous referees, and participants at the Governance Without Government Conference, Cardiff Business School, University of Wales, 11-13 May 2005 on an earlier draft are gratefully acknowledged.

1994; Heckscher and Applegate, 1994; Kofman and Senge, 1993; Davidow and Malone, 1992; Heckscher, 1991; Cooke, 1990). Are we living in a post-bureaucratic epoch? How would we know? To engage with this question it is necessary to specify the properties of an epoch and specifically a post-bureaucratic epoch; and then discuss types of evidence which would support or challenge this claim. Organizational changes in a national sector over a period of more than 20 years and evidence from other sectors and countries are considered here, in order to determine whether these add weight to, the post-bureaucratic epoch hypothesis or contradict it. Implications of this analysis are then outlined. Epoch The notion of a post-bureaucratic epoch is one of a number of epocalist claims in the management literature. Other candidates include: the “risk society”; “late-modernity”; and a host of uses of the prefix “post-” (for example, post-Fordism), to supposedly define the age we are in, or are moving into. Each epochal claim is advanced as a description of a distinctive and significant feature of the contemporary world. The notion of “epoch” is thus not aspirational – in the sense of explicitly desiring a future state – nor an analytical device such as an archetype. It purports to be an accurate representation of the contemporary world. The conditions which are creating, or will create, radical and unstoppable change are supposed to be already in place. They are “dissolving” (Beck, 1992) the old era (Dingwell, 1999; du Gay, 2003), and preparing the way for a new “post-bureaucratic” era. Evidence What is the evidence for the advent of a new post-bureaucratic era? What evidence would support, or counter, this view? Of course one can dismiss, as Beck (1992, p. 9) does, the importance of “methodological safeguards” in making empirical claims about major transforming processes. But what then distinguishes scholarship from mere claims by the already committed that they are the “eye-witness . . . of a break within modernity?” Following Weber and others, bureaucracy is viewed in this paper as a continuum – not as a condition that is either entirely present or absent. It is “a matter of degree, rather than kind” (Hall, 1963, p. 37). If we locate Weber’s ideal typical bureaucracy at one “extreme” and an imputed post-bureaucratic era at the other, the direction of change would be counter to the Weberian ideal type and evidence for such a trend would surely be discernible. “Epochal” claims should be derived from, and justified by, such evidence. Pointing to supposed instances of post-bureaucratic practices is not sufficient – the epochalists need also to demonstrate: . that these instances are increasing; and . that there are no significant moves in the opposite direction. Evidence of expansion, or intensification, of bureaucratic practices would be hugely damaging for the epochal claim. By “bureaucratic intensification”, we mean moves towards: implanting or extension of centralised and hierarchical control; specification and (often) quantification of overall and micro targets; detailed depictions of supposedly knowable and extensive “input” and “output” relationships; and formal

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reporting by and monitoring of aggregate, sub-aggregate, and individuals’ performances. Evidence of increases in both post-bureaucratisation and of further bureaucratisation would also undermine the epochal claim – overwhelmingly, if we are in an epoch, the trend should only be in the post-bureaucratic direction. Supportive literature The most striking features of the post-bureaucratic epoch asserting literature are: paucity of evidence; temporal and locational vagueness and silences; unwarranted generalisation and determinism. There is also a marked tendency to conflate description and desire. Paucity of evidence There are few, if any, identifications of post-bureaucratic organizations in the literature. Epoch announcers Heckscher and Applegate (1994, p. 3) admit that they can “find no developed exemplars of it [i.e. post-bureaucratic organization]”. Ungrounded assertions dominate (Alvesson and Thompson, 2004). There are few studies of post-bureaucratic practices (Barley and Kunda, 2001). In any event, identification of a practice that is deemed to be post-bureaucratic is not evidence of an epoch but merely that a pure bureaucratic form does not exist (Kallinikos, 2004; Courpasson, 2000), at least in the organization in which the practice was studied. Temporal and locational imprecision and silences In the same way, temporal and spatial aspects are evaded. When, and at what pace, is the transformation supposed to occur? And where is the epoch “located”? Is it globally, or regionally, or nationally located? At what borders do the epochal forces stop? Within which borders do they supposedly operate? The excess of speculation by epochalists about what is happening in their own “back-yard” is made even more problematic by the vapid assumption that the “back-yard” is representative of the world as a whole. Unwarranted generalisation When examples of what are deemed to be post-bureaucratic organizational practices are cited, they are unwarrantedly treated as evidence of an epoch. Some epochalists regard local instances as examples of the supposedly widespread whilst others acknowledge that these practices are uncommon but see them as prognostic, as signs of an emerging future as “advanced examples” (Child and Rodrigues, 2003, p. 13). But in both there is an unjustified leap from the micro local to the general – anecdotes become exemplars. The logic is circular as it presupposes what it claims to have discovered. Determinism All periodizations should be rooted in a disciplined theory of continuity and change which should identify how, when, and where powerful historical forces interact to generate the supposed change and its velocity (Green, 1995; Harris, 1998; Hill et al., 2000). But in the epochalist literature explanation – if provided - of the supposed cause of radical change is shallowly limited to one or other force – assumed to be determining. Techno-determinism is the most common causal assumption, but other contextual “determinants” – such as “globalisation”; “post-modernism”; “post-materialism”;

“post-industrial capitalism”; “cybernetic capitalism” – are sometimes viewed as the key source of fundamental change (Zuboff, 1988; Heydebrand, 1989; Vattimo, 1991; Løwendahl and Revang, 1998; Fosler, 1999; Child and McGrath, 2001; Child and Rodrigues, 2003). Absent is any consideration of: interpretative space (Grint and Woolgar, 1997); paradoxical effects (Hood and Peters, 2004); diversity; interplay between the key “determinants”; or recognition that the named influences might intensify rather than dilute bureaucracy. Overly normative Within the epochal literature description and desire – “we are living in a post-bureaucratic epoch ‘/’ we ought to be living in a post-bureaucratic epoch” – are insufficiently distinguished. Too often “ought” is represented as “is” (Kamarck, 2003). There is a non-epochal literature which is critical (on humanistic or efficiency grounds) of bureaucratic organization and urges – but does not predict – extensive, adoption of post-bureaucratic practices (Selznick, 1992). Unlike the epochal literature, it does not reduce “Is” to “Ought”. “Ought” may be derivable from “Is”, but they are not identical. However, “Is” cannot validly be derived from “Ought” (Hudson, 1969). The epochalist claim that major organizational transforming forces exist rests, it has been argued, on anorexic and inappropriately analysed evidence. Even more problematic for the epochalists is the counter-evidence. Counter-evidence There is considerable empirical evidence of widespread bureaucratic intensification (see above) during the past few decades – the very period in which the notion of a post-bureaucratic epoch emerged. This paper provides an historical overview and assessment of administrative/management changes in the UK’s Civil Service (hereafter the Civil Service) during that period; it then presents supporting evidence drawn from both the wider public sector in the UK and from the private sector. The UK Civil Service Every few years from the early-1980s to the present day, notwithstanding different prime ministers and changes in the ruling party, a new change programme, which seeks to achieve a more intense level of bureaucratisation in the Civil Service, is announced (6 and Peck, 2004; Harrison and Smith, 2003; Thomas and Dunkerley, 1999; McSweeney, 1994). The Weberian ideal-typical bureaucracy has not been implemented, and arguably never will. But the trajectory of the sought changes, and overwhelmingly the achieved changes, has been in the direction of the ideal-typical bureaucracy and not post-bureaucracy. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, calls for what has been described above as bureaucratic intensification in the Civil Service came from a range of significant sources, for example, the Fulton Committee (Cmnd 3638, 1968) and the Expenditure Committee (HC 535-I, 1977; McSweeney, 1994). A step change in bureaucratic intensification occurred in 1980 with the introduction of Management Information Systems for Ministers (MINIS), first in one department and later all departments. “The distinctive features of MINIS not normally found in systems operating in departments” were:

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Systematic annual reviews of objectives, tasks, costs and performance measures; much greater precision in the definition of tasks; much more precise performance measures; more specific attribution of costs and staff numbers to tasks and managerial functions; presentation of the results to Ministers; much greater involvement of Ministers (HC 236-I, 1982, p. xxviii).

In May 1982, the financial management initiative (FMI) was launched “with full and unqualified support of the Government and the top management of the Civil Service” (National Audit Office, 1986). Notwithstanding its name, the scope of the initiative was far from merely “financial”. It sought to extend MINIS across the entire Civil Service and to every level within each department. Beyond the Civil Service, the initiative was mandated or chosen as a model for many of the changes and evaluations of the UK’s wider public sector (Butler, 1993). In practice MINIS had been limited to senior management levels (Cmnd 8616, 1982). But now, it was to apply to “managers” at all levels from the most junior to government ministers. Each department was obliged to develop a structure of organization in which identifiable functions and objectives could be assigned to responsibility centres. These centres – also called “discrete units” – were to be subdivided further into “detailed cost centres” so that individuals, it was said, could be held responsible for the costs they “consumed” and their performance monitored – against objectives – which should be quantitative wherever possible (Cmnd 8616, 1982, p. 11). The implementation of the FMI was to be regularly reviewed by audits and special studies (Efficiency Unit, 1984). “Imagine the consequences of comprehensive bureaucratisation”, Weber states, “Rechenhaftigkeit, rational calculation, is manifest at every stage” (Coser and Rosenberg, 1964, p. 472). Following the recommendations of a 1988 report by the Prime Minister’s Efficiency Unit – Improving Management in Government: Next Steps – Civil Service activities were (again) reviewed. A number of options – which already had been implemented in a more piecemeal way – were considered for each activity, including “abolition, privatisation, contractorisation, including market testing, and rationalisation” (Cabinet Office, 1991). If it was decided that an activity should still be carried out within the Civil Service, it was to be done usually in an agency and always in line with “Next Steps principles”. At present, there are about 140 agencies covering 76 per cent of the Civil Service running on these principles. The type of management to be employed in the agencies is set out in Improving Management in Government: Next Steps (Efficiency Unit, 1988, also known as Next Steps, or the Ibbs Report). It is almost identical – even in language – with that of the earlier FMI (above). There should be: . . . greater precision about results expected of people . . . clear and accountable management reporting . . . a focus on outputs as well as inputs . . . [the management of the agency] must be held rigorously to accounts for results (Efficiency Unit, 1988, p. 11).

The senior Civil Servant in each agency became for the first time in the Civil Service a “chief executive” with “personal responsibility to the [government] Minister for day-to-day management”. Performance targets covering “quality of service, financial performance and efficiency” are imposed on each agency (Cabinet Office, 1999, p. 2). These have been maintained and extended and are regularly monitored.

In 1997, the new UK Government announced an even greater focus on target setting and monitoring for the agencies.

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The setting of clear, stretching performance targets is a key part of the philosophy underpinning Next Steps (Cm 4273, 1999, p. 5).

“SMART targets . . . specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timed” are said to “form the heart” of public sector management (Cm 4181, 1998, p. 5). In 2001, the UK Treasury established a delivery unit whose purpose was to monitor the progress of all government departments with respect to an estimated 130 public service agreement (PSA) targets. These PSA targets were first set-up in 1997. The delivery unit regularly identifies approximately 30 of these targets and “organises a series of stock-takes which the Prime Minister personally chairs” (HC 449, 2005). Increasingly in the UK Civil Service, the things that “count” are the things that are counted – and this counting is now being defined and monitored centrally. In some of the epochalist literature, the establishment of the Next Steps agencies has, because of some apparent decentralisation, been advanced as evidence of post-bureaucratization. But that characterisation depends on a significant misunderstanding of how these agencies are managed. Only in relation to certain matters have they increased autonomy. From April 1996, pay, grading, terms and conditions of all staff other than its “top management” which were previously determined uniformly across the Civil Service, were delegated to agencies (and remaining departments) or, more specifically, to their top management and chief executives. However, this type of decentralisation cannot be equated with the post-bureaucratization of the agencies. Control is not diffused within the agencies. And the chief executives’ powers over employment practices are subjected to the full requirements of regular monitoring of pre-set, and frequently, quantified, targets (James, 2003). Following a lengthy exploration of regulation inside government completed ten years after the reorganization of most of the Civil Service into agencies, Hood et al. (1999, p. 5) conclude that: . . . contrary to the stereotype that New Public Management involved ‘bonfires’ of government manuals and rulebooks . . . regulation of government seemed in many domains to have increased in formality, complexity, intensity, and specialization over the last two decades (emphasis added).

Rather than move the Civil Service in a post-bureaucratic direction, the establishment of the Next Steps agencies has led to a continuation, indeed an intensification of bureaucratization (Runciman, 2004; Gains, 2003; Efficiency Unit, 1991). In these agencies, and elsewhere in the Civil Service, there is as Rhodes (2000, p. 346) states: “more control over less”. The ongoing pursuit of a bureaucratic ideal indicates that complete transformation has not been and arguably will never be achieved. McSweeney (1994) distinguishes between the “implementation” of such changes and their shallower or less certain “implantation”. But, for over 20 years, the direction of changes sought has ran counter to those which could be expected of a post-bureaucratic epoch. A formal measure of bureaucratic intensification of the UK Civil Service is the growth in the number of accountants employed there. In mid-1982, the members of professional accountancy bodies (accountants) within the service numbered approximately 600. In that year their status was formally increased and a centralised Government

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Accountancy Service was established within the Civil Service and located within the most powerful department: HM Treasury. By mid-1992, whilst the total number of civil servants had fallen by 13 per cent (both on a head-count and full-time equivalent basis), the number of accountants had risen by over a third to 815. By mid-2002 (the latest period for which figures on the number of accountants is available), the number of civil servants had been reduced even more (by over 14 per cent on a full-time equivalent basis and by over 8 per cent on a headcount basis) but the number of accountants had risen by almost two-and-a-half times compared with 1992 to just over 2,000. There were also a further 800 trainee accountants. In addition, there are over 2,300 accounting technicians (a “lower”-level accounting qualification) who have either completed their studies or are at different stages of qualification. In 1982, there were few, if any, such technicians in the Civil Service. The evidence cited above spans more than 20 years and coincides with claims made for the advent of a post-bureaucratic epoch. Instead of post-bureaucratisation within the UK Civil Service, we have observed ongoing programmes of bureaucratic intensification. Below we supplement this evidence by examining some wider developments within the UK public sector. We also make a brief foray into data on private sector organisations in both the UK and elsewhere. These data show considerable diversity across a wide range of organizational control characteristics, but the evidence also indicates a broad trend in the direction of bureaucratic intensification. The wider UK public sector The trend towards centralisation and “management by numbers” found in above account of the UK Civil Service is apparent across the entire public sector. 6 and Peck’s (2004, pp. 90, 101) review of new labour’s “modernization programme” identifies in “almost every area of public management . . . increased powers of inspection and the proliferation of new inspection agencies . . . and a plethora of targets centrally set” and the “re-assertion of hierarchy”. Harrison and Smith (2003, p. 243) conclude from “an examination of approaches to management of the [UK’s] National Health Service over the last twenty years” that there has been “increasing bureaucratisation”. Hood et al. (1999, p. 5) having noted a very substantial increase in bureaucratisation in the UK’s public sector over a 20 year period, observe that this intensification was even more apparent in the regulation of local government and the outer reaches of the public sector than that found in core government departments [i.e. of the Civil Service]. The introduction of elected mayors in some UK cities and areas has been lauded as a counter bureaucratic development. Yet the result has been a huge concentration of powers in the hands of the new mayors and the subsequent radical reduction of the powers of elected local councillors or assembly members (SI 1815, 2004). To take another example, UK universities have also experienced increasing control and monitoring over the last two decades (Chandler et al. 2002; Hood and Peters, 2004; Pollock, 2004; Schofield, 2001; Imrie and Raco, 1999; Hood, 1998; McSweeney, 1988). Many of the main international management consultancy firms have been involved in attempts to implement major organizational changes within the UK’s public sector. Were post-bureaucratisation occurring elsewhere other than the UK’s public sector, these firms would have been carriers of, advocates for, sellers of, post-bureaucracy. Instead, they have eulogised the benefits of ever-greater bureaucratisation (McSweeney, 1988; McSweeney and Duncan, 1998; Saint-Martin, 2000).

Beyond the UK public sector This outline of developments within the UK public sector shows that bureaucratic practices have remained. In the same way, in the USA, the Gore Report from a committee chaired by the then vice-president attacked “bureaucracy” and “red tape” whilst endorsing the numbers-based bureaucratic controls that we have observed in the UK’s Civil Service for US public management (Executive Office of the President, 1993). These proposals added to an already established tendency towards centralised control of public organizations in the USA (Lynn, 1994). How far can bureaucratic practices and controls be said to have left the “stage” of private sector organisations? The argument of this paper is not that bureaucratic intensification is true globally in all organizations, sectors, and countries. We just do not know. But clearly what has happened in the UK’s public sector has also occurred, contrary to what is implied in the epochalist vision, in many countries in both the public and private sectors (Budd, 2004; Edwards, 2002; de Arau´jo, 2001; Thompson et al., 2001; Keep and Rainbird, 2000; Prince, 2000; Cross et al. 2000; Guyomarch, 1999; Lloyd and Newell, 1998; Ackroyd and Procter, 1998; Gallie et al., 1998; Taylor, 1997). We can also cite evidence from a range of private sectors settings which contradicts the claims for the historic demise of the bureaucratic form. Thus, studies of “professionals” such as lawyers and doctors have shown a decline in trust and collegiality and moves towards greater central control and the extensive growth of centralized auditing and others forms of regulation and monitoring (Heinz et al., 2005; Freidson, 2001; Power, 1997). Again, Harley (1995) analysed data from the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey and found that “contrary to the claims of the emergence of the ‘post-bureaucratic organisation’, hierarchical structure remains central to the majority of contemporary organisations”. Some advocates of post-bureaucracy have depicted project management as the front-wave of post-bureaucracy, as the fastest route away from bureaucracy. But as Clegg and Courpasson (2004, pp. 523, 545) state: “these contours frequently seem to be sighted without bearings on the current realities of project management”. Drawing on an ethnographic enquiry into the experience of project management, these authors conclude that such management “neither abolishes control nor those tensions associated with it. Instead it has distinct modalities of control, each of which generates quite specific tensions. These are not so much an innovation in organization form but a repositioning of some classic questions” (Hodgson, 2004). Barker (1993) concludes from a study of “self-managing teams” in the US that the “reality was the tightening of Weber’s iron cage of rational control rather than a loosening”. Hill et al. (2000, p. 578) studied the organization of research and development (R&D) projects in a sample of US and UK owned firms in two industrial sectors (mechanical engineering, and food and drink) using both survey and case research. They particularly considered one aspect of the “post-bureaucratic paradigm” – decentralization – and in one function R&D. They found no evidence of moves to decentralization and in significant instances “relations between the corporate centre and subsidiaries were becoming more not less centralized. Many commentators, moreover, have argued that the most significant source of employment growth in the developed world is likely to be in the new service industries. The growth of service industries is linked to theories of postindustrialism, to the

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growing use of information technology, and to the rise of “knowledge work” – features which have been closely associated with the advent of new and more flexible post-bureaucratic forms (See Harris in this issue). However, Alvesson and Thompson (2004, p. 492) point out that: “a powerful body of evidence has accumulated about the ‘industrialization’ of services” (Bolton, 2004). Studies of call centres and other service settings have identified a focus on standardization, often reinforced by high-surveillance technology, such that operatives experience “an assembly-line in the head” (Taylor and Bain, 1998). Multiple studies of employees involved in “emotional labour” in a variety of settings such as leisure parks, flight attendants, receptionists, and social workers point to a growth in rule-driven and standardised verbal and visual displays of “niceness” (Hochschild, 1983). Here again, we find substantial evidence for re-bureaucratization and little or nothing to support the belief that events are “flowing with an epochalist tide”. False periodization and ideational singularism The paper has presented evidence taken from a broad range of public and private sector settings. This evidence shows that bureaucratic practices remain and there are, moreover, good reasons for believing that we are seeing a significant intensification of bureaucratic practices. Why, despite this, do some scholars persist in making epochal claims? Only one possible influence is considered here: a wider malaise in the management literature: an overemphasis on “subsuming” or “mono-ideational” explanations (McSweeney, 1995). These “unicities” can only suppose a complete absence change (Hofstede, 2001) or “absolute-change” – thus reflecting an historical tendency to adopt rigid periodizations in which one unicity is opposed to another (Abercrombie et al., 1980; Archer, 1988; McSweeney, 2002). An example is the periodizing sense in which the notion of “post-modern” (or “post-modernist”; or “post-modernism”; or “post-modernity”) is widely used – literally as post (i.e. after – succeeding and negating) the modern (Dent, 1995; Child and McGrath, 2001; Rifkin, 2004; Farmer, 2005; Gorman, 2004; Alvesson, 1995; Parker, 1992; Rose, 1991). The logic is that bureaucracy and modernity are inextricably bound to each other (Kallinikos, 2004) but as we now live in a post-modern, not a modern epoch, a new organizational form (the post-bureaucratic) is emerging and will dominate. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, a “high-priest” of postmodernism, emphatically rejected such periodization: “Post-modern is not to be taken in a periodizing sense” (Lyotard and The´baud, 1985, p. 16n) and “The postmodern . . . is undoubtedly a part of the modern . . . postmodernism . . . is not modernism at its end” (Lyotard, 1986, 1993, pp. 26, 79). As Heller and Fehe´r (1988, p. 1) state: “postmodernity is not a historical period”. Two aspects of the post-bureaucratic discourse reflect the ideational singularism noted above. First, there is the idea of epoch itself. Although it is a notion of very long-standing, its use in the management literature does not long precede the arrival of “epochal” claims made for post-bureaucracy. Most significant for its insertion into managerial discourses was the rise of interest in the work of Michael Foucault and, more specifically of a particular readings which highlighted the notion of epoch in Foucault’s work. Foucault himself was, however, scathing about the homogeneous notion of an epoch. In a 1968 interview, translated into English as early as 1972, he stated:

Nothing, you see, is more foreign to me than the quest for a sovereign, unique and constraining form. I do not seek to detect . . . the unitary spirit of an epoch, the general form of its consciousness . . . I am a pluralist” (Burchell et al., 1991, p. 55).

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Later, in 1983, Foucault also stated: I think we should have the modesty to say to ourselves . . . the time we live in is not the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history where everything is completed and begun again (Alvesson, 1995).

That has, however, not prevented the legitimation of unicity in the name of Foucault. Indeed whole academic careers have been built almost entirely by peppering claims to have discovered the decisive current epoch with quotations from early Foucault. Another singular understanding, that of the supposed uniform political content of the New Right, is also germane to a more critical understanding of “the post-bureaucratic turn”. The libertarian ideology of the New Right is anathema to public sector bureaucracy and it has often been equated with the post-bureaucratic turn (Kamarck, 2003). But a closer study of the New Right reveals that it is not a monodology, not a coherence, but a coalition, indeed a syncretism of ideas. It is a: “an ensemble of sub-gospels with inter- and intra-factions and disputes” (McSweeney and Duncan, 1998, p. 346) which contains equally significant authoritarian dimensions which emphasise central control, formal rules, detailed monitoring, reduction in discretion – and thus bureaucratic intensification (Gamble, 1996; Stone, 1996). Contemporary readings of the New Right as Neo-Con[servative]s (Stelzer, 2004) resonate strongly with these centralising tendencies. Conclusion The essence of the post-bureaucracy thesis is that we are in the midst of, or on the threshold of, a fundamental transformation – the ultimate and inevitable replacement of bureaucratic organizations by post-bureaucratic ones. This is a dramatic and weighty claim. The consequences of such a reformation would be immense, rippling well beyond the current interest in the post-bureaucratic organization. The burden of proof lies with the epochalists – but this is a task which they have performed with very limited success. Far from demonstrating that the direction of organizational change is uniquely or overwhelmingly towards the post-bureaucratic, epochal claims rely on scattered, contestable and anecdotal descriptions of organisational practice. The epochalist vision is one of total transformation. It cannot incorporate pluralism and forecloses any search for deeper conditions of possibility. This vision also denies the complex, diverse, coexisting, and interpenetrating nature of organisations. The epochalists presuppose the existence of the epoch. A willingness to make empirical statements carries an obligation to test counter-views and counter-data. This does not require a rigid commitment to the correspondence theory of truth – empirical tests may be inconclusive and results always contestable (McSweeney, 2000) – but the absence of this commitment allows very large claims to be made on the basis highly selective and partial citation of the “facts”. “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air” (Keynes, 1936) are closed to self-interrogation and to the consideration of alternative views, but must this also be true of scholars?

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6, P. and Peck, E. (2004), “New labour’s modernization in the public sector: a neo-durkheimian approach and the case of mental health services”, Public Administration, Vol. 82 No. 1, pp. 83-108. Further reading Butler, R. (1995), “The themes of public service in Britain and overseas”, Policy Studies, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 4-25. Cm 2627 (1994), Continuity and Change, HMSO, London. Cm 2748 (1995), The Civil Service: Taking Forward Continuity and Change, HMSO, London. Cm 914 (1989), The Financing and Accountability of Next Steps Agencies, HMSO, London. Farrell, C. and Morris, J. (2003), “The ‘Neo-Bureaucratic’ state: professionals, managers and professional managers in schools, general practices and social work”, Organization, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 129-56. HC 61 (1987), “The financial management initiative”, Thirteenth Report from the Committee of Public Accounts, Session 1986-87, HMSO, London. HC 494 (1988), “Civil service management reform: the next steps”, Eighth Report from the Treasury and Civil Service Committee, Session 1987-88, HMSO, London. HC 496 (1991), “The next steps initiative”, Seventh Report from the Treasury and Civil Service Committee, Session 1990-91, HMSO, London. Hetherington, K. and Munro, R. (Eds) (1997), Ideas of Difference: Social Spaces and the Labour of Division, Blackwell/Sociological Review, Oxford. Kant, I. (1996), Critique of Pure Reason, Macmillan, London, trans. Smith, N.K.. Scott, J.C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

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Richard Hull Business School, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, UK Abstract Purpose – To present empirical research on the adoption of workload allocation models (WAMs) within the UK university system and relate these to the broader context of the new public management (NPM). Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on the historical sociology of the professions to highlight the dilemmas posed by the adoption of WAMs. Findings – University managers and academics are faced with some difficult choices. Managers are faced with a requirement to develop, implement and if necessary challenge a range of new tasks, business processes, projects to be managed and teams to be led. For staff, the choice is to accept the increased workloads or to lobby for increased resources. However, calls for “increased resources” is likely to entail further bureaucratisation. A more transparent and accountable approach to academic work may offer a more viable way forward than that implied by recourse to the fundamentally elitist notions of “collegiality”. Originality/value – The paper presents new research on WAMs and NPM. Keywords Working practices, Universities, Critical management, Public administration, Bureaucracy, United Kingdom Paper type Research paper

Journal of Organizational Change Management Vol. 19 No. 1, 2006 pp. 38-53 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810610643677

1. Introduction Discussions of social and organisational change have apparently been “dominated by a ‘discourse of endings ’” (Courpasson and Reed, 2004, p. 6), such as the “end” of bureaucracy, modernity, etc. One example is the passing or deterioration of the collegial manner of working to which, supposedly, we academics were accustomed in days gone by. Collegiality is typically characterised as “consensual decision-making, cooperation and shared values” (Kinman and Jones, 2004, p. 10). There is an increasing tendency for UK institutions of learning to adopt formal workload allocation models (or WAMs), systems or schemes. The introduction of WAMs is, arguably, yet another nail in the coffin of “academic collegiality”: the categorisation and measurement our work removes another aspect of our professional autonomy and hence reduces the possibilities for collegiality. On the other hand, might such models instead be seen as a sensible means of ensuring fairness in the distribution of work amongst diverse academics? How then should academics respond to the introduction of a new WAM? And in a broader context, what if anything does the proliferating use of WAMs tell us about current changes in the management of UK higher education? The introduction of WAMs has to date received little or no academic analysis. This paper presents preliminary research on a range of the models which have emerged within UK universities[1]. Tentative and partial answers are offered in respect of the first two questions noted above. The paper will also critically engage with some of

the literature on broader changes in UK higher education. In particular I challenge the notion that “collegiality” is necessarily something to be defended and, following Waters (1989), posits an alternative viewpoint. Waters argues that collegiality was re-defined and constructed as a defence against perceived attacks upon the autonomy of higher education and the professions in the USA during the early twentieth century. Although those attacks were characterised as “bureaucratisation” and “commercialisation”, Waters (1989) argues that these early twentieth century expressions of collegiality, despite claims of equality in its treatment of clients, can be seen as an essentially self-interested means of sustaining elitism and class-based inequality within higher education. If Waters’ Weberian argument is correct, then “defending collegiality” would appear to be a very poor response to the introduction of work allocation models or other examples of increased managerialism in UK universities. In the final section of the paper, I draw upon studies taken from the historical sociology of technology to argue that WAMs should be understood on two parallel levels: firstly as significant and initially flexible actors within the local circumstances of their application; but secondly, that it is precisely their flexibility which will always demand more work from those attempting to understand or challenge the models – at least, until additional resources are become available. 2. Collegiality – new whine from old bottles? By most accounts collegiality in higher education is rapidly being displaced, threatened or distorted by one or more of the following: managerialism (Trow, 1994), the “McUniversity” (Parker and Jary, 1995), the “new higher education” ( Jary and Parker, 1998), new public management (NPM) (Chandler et al., 2004), the intensification of work (Kinman and Jones, 2004), the emergence of “professional leadership” (Hellstro˝m, 2004), new “audit technologies” (Shore and Wright, 2000), the commodification of intellectual labour and academic work (Willmott, 1995; Shumar, 1997), the proletarianisation of academics (Dearlove, 1997), and the emergence of entrepreneurialism and the corporate university, also dubbed “academic capitalism” (Deem, 2001). It would appear that UK academic staff are increasingly unable to cope with the new pressures of work (Kinman and Jones, 2004; Baty, 2005b), and universities are coming under increasing pressure over work-stress from the UK health and safety executive, with one university recently ordered to reform its procedures for managing work-related stress (Baty, 2005a). Clearly there are many undesirable changes occurring in UK universities – increased workloads, other forms of work intensification, increasing stratification between different grades and locations of academic staff. However, it is less obvious that the key issue in resisting these changes resides with defending the notion of “collegiality”. Weber, for example, in his brief and rather unspecific discussions of collegiality, viewed this as insufficiently responsive and less efficient than the bureaucratic form (Waters, 1989, p. 946). Moreover, recent managerialist pronouncements suggest that a sceptical approach to collegiality may be useful. In the “role profiles” for academic staff, developed jointly by employers and unions, senior academics are expected as part of their team work duties to “promote a collegiate approach” (UCEA, 2004, pages un-numbered). The emerging field of “quality management in higher education” promotes a “new collegialism”. It is “in the interests

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of continuous quality improvement” (Newton, 2002, p. 203) that academics should pursue team-work. Collegiality as team work could, however, be viewed more critically as one of the new “softer” forms of control emerging in contemporary organisational change (Barker, 1999). Finally, the UK Change Academy (a collaboration between the Higher Education Academy and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education), appears to endorse a closer relationship between the “managerial” and “collegial” cultures, where the latter “begins and ends with the professoriate” (Rice, 2004, pp. 5-6). Those currently bemoaning the “end” of academic collegiality in the face of managerialism, etc. may not be overenthusiastic about these team-focussed, quality-led or professoriate interpretations of collegiality. Waters (1989) provides a more rigorous definition of collegiality, arguing that: .

Collegial structures are those in which there is dominant orientation to a consensus achieved between the members of a body of experts who are theoretically equal in their levels of expertise but who are specialised by area of expertise (Waters, 1989, p. 956).

However, Waters sounds a definite note of caution about the merits of such collegial structures. He posits three ideal-types of collegiate organisation in relation to different degrees of bureaucratisation, namely: “exclusively collegiate”, “predominantly collegiate”, and “intermediate collegiate”. “Exclusive” collegiality is only likely in small private organisations where internal coordination is through complete consensus and face-to-face participation. Here there is no distinction between professional and administrative roles, and both the internal exercise of authority over colleagues and the external exercise of authority over clients are unmediated by bureaucracy. Collegiality is thus “undivided and absolute within the goals of the organization” (Waters, 1989, p. 960, emphasis added). The “predominantly collegiate” type is characteristic of larger organisations (especially hospitals and universities) that combine professional and administrative activity, with the latter subordinate to the former. Here internal authority is collegiate insofar as members agree to be bound by consensual or majority decisions taken within differentiated professional activities or disciplines. However, external relations, such as those with hospital patients or students, are not totally “undivided and absolute”, but mediated by a variety of administrators and rules. Resource allocation is administered through classic bureaucratic means. The “intermediate collegiate” organisation also pertains to large organisations, but in this case relations between professional and administrative activity is reversed. As with the “predominantly collegiate” type, external authority is mediated and bureaucratic. However, “professional employees” within the organisation are subordinated to the administrative framework and are granted relatively little autonomy. Whilst there may be some measure of collegial decision-making within professional groupings, this takes the form of professional advice to the administration, which may overrule it. For Waters, writing in 1989, this type was characteristic of schools, libraries, welfare agencies, and R&D units. This framework can be seen as a useful heuristic for characterising contemporary change within higher education – in particular charting the shift from “predominantly collegiate” to “intermediate collegiate” types – but the important distinction is between different authority relations. In particular, because collegial authority rests only upon

what Waters calls “superior knowledge” (Waters, 1989, p. 961) (or perhaps more appropriately, “superior expertise”; Hull, 2000a, b, 2001), which is essentially contestable and thus less stable: “there are no independent courts of judgement of expertise in the way that there are courts of judgement of legal rectitude” (Waters, op cit). He predicts, as Weber did, that collegiality will always bow to pressure from bureaucratisation and limited resources. Contradicting the earlier structuralist-functionalist work of Talcott Parsons which praised the rise of collegial professional associations, Waters argues forcefully that “collegiate” relations of internal authority (self-regulation) and external authority over clients were advanced by the professions in the early twentieth century as a response to a variety of state, corporate, commercial and bureaucratic pressures. Following Larsen (1977), He contends that the professions had originally secured their independence through their links with elite clients. Faced with these pressures, they developed an ideology focused on: . . . the notion of a calling, universalistic treatment of clients, and the value of service (Waters, 1989, p. 966).

This collegiate ideology: . . . is a response by professionals to state and commercial corporatism, but its consequence is a modification of structures of domination in the professionals’ favour and not degradation of these structures of domination, which remain firmly in place (Waters, p. 971).

Collegiality, in other words, merely maintains the status quo for privileged professionals – including those us working in universities. If “defending collegiality” is not an option for those academics wishing to contest and challenge the undesirable aspects of contemporary changes in higher education, what other options are available? Related to this is an awkward question: why have academics supposedly adept at analysing and understanding organisational change, especially in the public sector and even more specifically in higher education, allowed our own working conditions to be so drastically undermined (Smyth, 1994)? One answer could be a conscious or semi-conscious awareness of our relatively privileged position. But recent analyses of the academic labour process also suggest that academics are “poorly prepared” for organised resistance (Willmott, 1995). Other studies contend that many academics quietly resist some aspects of managerialism (Prichard and Willmott, 1997). A response to both questions from critical management studies is that the relative dearth of theoretical and empirical analyses of the everyday working conditions of academics (Danieli and Thomas, 1999) has prevented us from developing any systematic or shared understanding of these conditions. This situation is currently being rectified, by research on the new “accountability” in academe (Strathern, 2000; Nyland and Woolgar, 2002), workplace stress (Kinman and Jones, 2004; Chandler et al., 2004), the emotional labour of academic work (Ogbonna and Harris, 2004) and senior managers’ perceptions of the complexities of university management (Prichard and Willmott, 1997). In the spirit of such studies, let us now examine the adoption of work allocation models within a selection of UK university departments.

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3. Work allocation models Typically, a WAM categorises academic work into discrete activities, together with some basis for comparison. The basis is usually numerical: the model proposes a standard unit of work – for instance presenting a one-hour lecture – and other activities are graded on that basis. For example, preparing (as opposed to presenting) a one-hour lecture might count as two units. This is a very fine grain of analysis; other schemes specify teaching and assessing a ten-credit module to 30 students as the standard unit, whilst some do not adopt a strict numerical basis and rely instead on a set of equivalencies. Recently many UK academics have been asked to record the proportion of their time spent on various teaching and research activities, and there is now a widespread acceptance that any academic’s work is split between teaching, research and administration: it has become a taken-for-granted assumption that these are three mutually exclusive types of activity (notwithstanding the various attempts to establish the synergies and other necessary relations between teaching and research), and moreover that they are at least to some extent measurable. It would be very tempting to view WAMs and the more widespread categorisations of academic work as merely further manifestations of the displacement and distortion of collegiality, and of increasing managerialism, bureaucracy or perhaps “post-bureaucracy” (Courpasson and Reed, 2004), surveillance and the commodification of academic work. By first categorising and then measuring quite discrete and mutually exclusive elements of our work, managers, administrators and politicians are removing yet another aspect of the professional autonomy we once had over our working conditions, and attempting to instil new forms of self-discipline as we become increasingly focused on the balances between newly categorised activities. But might such models instead be seen in an entirely opposite light? Personally, my first reaction upon encountering such a model was that it was a very sensible way of ensuring fairness in the distribution of work amongst diverse academics – especially in departments or schools with a variety of academic disciplines[2], or with a wide gap between teaching-focussed and research-focussed staff. It seemed to me that some academics have had a tendency to claim a special privilege for the workload involved in teaching their particular discipline or speciality, and some research-intensive academics have been able to claim excessive exemption from teaching and administrative duties. Indeed, the UK Association of University Teachers has a “model workload agreement” which is based on the expectation: That workloads will be managed in an open and democratic way . . . and that a disputes procedure will enable staff to challenge unfair and/or unreasonable distribution of workload, if necessary (AUT, 2003, p. 3).

Clearly, a WAM which enables straight-forward comparisons to be made between the workloads of colleagues of different ranks and disciplines is a major step towards meeting that expectation. However, the very concept of a WAM also raises the question of the origins of unfair and unreasonable distributions of workloads – are people really suggesting that there was some golden, pre-managerial age of collegiality when academics shared the workload equally, when all discussion was open and consensual, and when disputes were resolved through open and democratic means? Is it not at least possible that this

rosy picture of bygone collegiality is being constructed post facto as a rhetorical device, for whatever reasons? 3.1 Varieties of work allocation model All models require some categorisation or typology of academic work, even if only to distinguish teaching, research and administration. This suggests two features of the typology: its origins, and its granularity or level of detail. The sociology of classification suggests that the origin of a typology or classification is highly significant for its operation and consequences (Bowker and Star, 2000), but a single typology can be the basis for different models, as these attach different weightings and calculations to activities. Hence the origin and control of the model is also a significant aspect. Table I presents information on the origins of the typology and of the model, information on the sources of details for each WAM, the existence or otherwise of workload agreements with academic unions, and the existence or otherwise of staff development courses on work allocation models. Table II presents the key to Table I categories for the origin of the model. 3.2 Granularity The finest level of detail is one tenth of an hour, used in a WAM based on the hours, to one decimal place, spent on a range of activities. Another WAM is based on a points system: one point for presenting a one-hour lecture or seminar, two points for preparing a lecture, and so on through a list of 33 teaching and administrative activities and roles. A different approach is taken in one case where the baseline is “one full-time undergraduate”, to which is attached a certain number of points. A fairly common broad baseline is teaching a one-semester module to a specified number of students, although as student numbers rise, some WAMs adopt a weighting for the actual student numbers. WAMs differ in the extent to which they differentiate between teaching, marking, administering a module, and preparing a new module. 3.3 Counting research Research and scholarly activities are treated with considerable variation, from no mention, through a single blanket category, to points for both speculative activities (applications, attending meetings) and achievements (grants, outputs), where the points can be carried forward. This model explicitly provides incentives to be research active. 3.4 Origin of model In some cases the incentive was a quality assurance agency (QAA) subject or institution review or a professional association’s accreditation, which identified uneven workload as an issue that needed addressing by a formal model. In other cases staff development workshops get heads of department to compare the variety of WAMs in the university, and develop “best practice” for the university. In many cases central management have agreed with the local association of AUT or NATFHE on the broad policy towards WAMs, often based exactly upon the AUT’s model workload agreement. Interestingly, in two cases a phrase in the “Aims” section of the agreement, which originally read “to protect and enhance the democratic structures of the university”, has been altered with the replacement of “democratic” by “collegial” or “collegiate”. In at least one case

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Table I. Varieties of work allocation model

1

2

3

Full details of WAM? Source of WAM details QAA review (institution or subject) University or union web X X X Personal correspondence X Origin of typology Department X Central Origin of model Department X Faculty, medical or business school Central resource planning HR function Quality unit X L&T strategy Council, senate, governors Other Staff development courses on WAMs Local AUT/NATFHE workload agreement? X X

5

7

8 X

X X

X

X

X X X X X X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

Post-92 universities

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

X X X X

X X

6

X X

X X

X X

4

Pre-92 universities

44

University identifier

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Category

Description

Department

Model developed prior to central intervention; in some cases departments utilise a centrally developed typology Model developed at the level of the faculty, medical school or business school Model developed centrally as part of resource planning and allocation Model developed by central human resource management function, sometimes in response to concerns over stress and workload Model developed by central quality unit, sometimes in response to QAA reports identifying “uneven workload” as an issue for the quality of learning resources Model developed as part of a central learning and teaching strategy Suggestion for model comes from one of the university governing bodies

Faculty, medical or business school Central resource planning HR function Quality unit

L&T strategy Council, senate, governors

the local association began negotiations with central management to agree the specific details of a university-wide WAM, but following a failure to agree several departments went ahead with WAMs of their own. By contrast, in at least one instance central management has attempted to impose a centrally-devised WAM upon a number of pilot departments, but it has been met with considerable and successful resistance as the model bore little resemblance to staff’s perception of their workloads. I have only very limited data on the motivations of those departments who established their own WAMs independently of policy recommendations from QAA subject reviews or accreditation visits. However, here again there would seem to be a clear difference between cases where the WAM has been developed in order to ensure greater fairness, accountability and transparency in the allocation of workloads, and those cases where the motivation has been far more directed towards the rational and efficient allocation of limited resources. 3.5 Format Given the complexity of the models it is not surprising that most are implemented within either database or spreadsheet applications. Of course, such IT applications, by enabling the collection and manipulation of masses of data, may merely encourage the development of models that are more complex than is strictly needed. One highly complex model also includes academic-related, clerical and technical staff and their activities: it is centrally-owned and managed and is essentially a management information system, with complex relational databases, spreadsheets and reporting functions. 3.6 Presentation and accessibility For some staff their first experience of a WAM will be receiving a piece of paper, or an electronic equivalent, detailing their “allocation”, or “workload breakdown”, or any number of other phrases describing the individualised report from a WAM. The point

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Table II. Key to Table I categories for origin of model

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here is that the WAM results are sometimes presented to staff as an individualised fait accompli – “this is what you will be doing/have been doing”. In some cases staff may also receive a summary of the allocations for some or all other staff in their department/school, but without seeing the detailed breakdowns. Further, there are varying degrees of access to the detailed operation of the model, in terms of ability to read and challenge information, and in the more subtle sense of the manner in which information and especially calculations are presented – for instance several models deploy a large number of abbreviations, and one sets out a calculation using a highly specialised notation. There is also considerable variation in access to the precise details of data collection and verification, and the origins and operation of weightings and calculations which generate indicators such as the overall “points” or workload of any person. A significantly different approach to presentation comes from one head of department who publicly made clear their personal disapproval of the local AUT for acceding to university demands on workloads. In this department and in the AUT model agreement, a person’s allocation is first discussed with the HoD, before any final allocation is agreed, and all details of the operation of the WAM, and the allocations of other staff, are made fully accessible. 4. Perspectives on WAMs Given the considerable variation between models identified above – especially the variation in the origins or justifications of such models – it should already be clear that no simple one-dimensional perspective will suffice. WAMs are clearly not just another manifestation of unnecessary and unpleasant managerialism, but neither can we consider them merely as benign tools for ensuring fairness. In this section, after a brief discussion of the two overt and explicit rationales behind most work allocation models, I then address two broader theoretical perspectives – the literature on “New Public Management” in the UK public sector, and, given that most WAMs are implemented as spreadsheets or databases, the literature on IT and organisational change. 4.1 Rational resource allocation, redressing inequalities Although “workload allocation” or “workload model” are not mentioned in the QAA’s guidance documents or Code of Practice, they increasingly appear in Institutional Audits and Subject Reviews of the quality of teaching and learning, where they are always under the heading of “learning resources”: reviewers are asked to “evaluate the effectiveness of the deployment of academic and support staff in support of the intended learning outcomes” (QAA, 2003, p. 43), and this evaluation remains in the new Institutional Audit (QAA, 2002, p. 20). Comments on workload models, workload analysis and workload planning have been made in six of the newer Institutional Audits. Common to many QAA comments on workload models is that they have been introduced, or should be introduced, to redress perceived imbalances in workloads. This is echoed in some cases where a WAM includes a rationale or justification – one handbook explicitly cites “equity between teachers”. There is a different ordering of priorities in another model, which is presented as “basically a resource allocation tool intended to facilitate efficiency, effectiveness, transparity (sic) and equity amongst staff”.

These two rationales for work allocation models – resource planning and ensuring equality of workload – clearly conform to many elements of Weber’s ideal-typical bureaucracy. Resources should be planned and allocated according to established procedures, efficiently, in accordance with clear instrumental goals, without grace or favour, those performing these tasks should do so from established positions of authority, and staff should be appointed on the basis that they are the best qualified to perform pre-specified and highly specific tasks. 4.2 New public management It has been argued for some time that public sector organisations are becoming subject to a new style of management, as welfare-based social democracies come under increasing pressures to compete with other nations. NPM has been characterised as: . . . seven dimensions of change: greater disaggregation; enhanced competition; the use of management practices drawn from the private sector; greater stress on discipline and parsimony in resource use; a move towards more hands-on management; a concern for more explicit and measurable standards of performance; and attempts to control according to pre-set output measures (Chandler et al., 2004, p. 1054, citing Hood, 1995).

Chandler et al. (2004), echoing Prichard and Willmott (1997), however, argue that although there are significant moves towards NPM within UK higher education, the implementation is patchy and subject not only to significant renegotiation as academics attempt to retain “collegiality”, but also even to some overt resistance. The question here is the extent to which we should see work allocation models as representative of NPM, or of attempts to alleviate the effects of NPM. Clearly WAMs may be operationalised in both ways – by central or senior management as resource control and to meet externally-set targets; or to alleviate uneven workloads. However, to the extent that such models make academic work more measurable and calculable, they definitely contribute to an assumption that good and effective management of academic work demands such measurement, whether “good and effective” is taken to mean rational resource allocation or the alleviation of inequality. In other words, despite any short-term intention of alleviating inequality, in the long run WAMs can only reinforce the validity of the concepts and techniques bundled together as NPM in higher education. There are two objections to this view. Firstly, unless one is careful to define NPM as a roughly related set of techniques and concepts with mixed applicability to any specific organisation, there is a danger of elevating NPM to the status of a structural dynamic, a real and existing socio-economic force, when in actuality NPM is merely a label attached to a collection of techniques, concepts, trends and phenomena – it has no independent existence beyond the pages of academic journals (so far, at any rate!). Secondly, the view positions the measurement and calculation of work as being somehow opposed to professional autonomy or the “proper” organisation of work in general – measurement and calculation are seen as one-dimensional in their effects and origins. Whereas, as many studies have suggested, there will always be considerable negotiation and interpretive work entailed in any attempt to “represent” and measure work (Hughes et al., 2002). Further, the blanket characterisation of measurement and calculation fails to distinguish between what Power (2004) calls “first order” and “second order” measures. First order measures are what we would normally call “counting”, but which Power

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(2004) more accurately describes as “the institutions of classification that make counting possible”. Where those classification schemes are relatively invisible and taken for granted counting becomes apparently “natural” (Bowker and Star, 2000). Second order measurement, or “meta-measurement”, aggregates first-order numbers using mathematical and statistical operations and calculations to create further ratios, indices or indicators, such as performance and quality management targets. Unless the specific details of those combinations and operations are challenged, the second order measures become just as apparently “natural” as first order measures. 4.3 IT, calculation and organisation Many of these more nuanced perspectives on the measurement and calculation of work have arisen from sociological and historical studies of the development and implementation of new technologies, new IT and new calculation and accounting systems (Dutton, 1996; Hopwood and Miller, 1994), from studies which combine analysis of technological innovation with critical management studies (Hull and Kaghan, 2000), and from analytical reconciliation of the macro-scale radical political economy of technical change with micro-sociological studies of technological innovation and implementation (Green et al., 1999; Rip and Groen, 2001) From such perspectives we can argue that work allocation models, as new technologies of work, need to be understood on two parallel levels. Firstly as a significant but flexible local actor within specific organisational settings or networks (Callon, 1992), and secondly as possessing some generic characteristics in terms of the broader changes in the character of higher education and academic work. As local actors WAMs may be constructed and implemented within a wide variety of interests, traditions and developing relations between other actors. Other actors include heads of department, members of staff, local associations of the AUT, narratives about “the way we do things here”, institutional budgetary and accounting systems, departmental information systems, university senior management, debates about work allocation or increased workloads, or reports arising from external or university inspections. In addition, the localised impact of the models will equally be mediated through the same or similar networks of actors. In other words, to borrow another phrase from the sociology of technology, there is considerable “interpretive flexibility” about WAMs – their exact meanings and perceived effects may be understood in a wide variety of ways. From this perspective, the generic features of WAMs, such as their requirement for typologies and measurable activities, are of less significance than the particular local networks which develop, maintain and implement the models. This view clearly fits the observation that WAMs may be operationalised in radically different ways. There is, however, another broader perspective that also fits this observation. IT applications commonly tend towards a number of contradictory approaches to the “proper” relations between people, organisations and machines. Whilst it is clear from the history of IT and computing that there is a strong element of a Taylorist, calculative view of organisational members as expendable cogs in a machine, it is less often acknowledged that there is in nearly equal measure an element of an interactionist and humanist view of organisational members as active and varied interpreters and communicators, who may put IT applications to a wide variety of uses – and hence that IT applications should be designed with this in mind (Hull, 1998).

It should therefore come as no surprise that a spreadsheet, for instance, may just as easily be used to reduce academic work to measurable activities, as (when placed on a network or distributed electronically) to reveal previously hidden aspects of an organisation, or to enable organisational members to challenge the basis of calculations and the derivation of second order measurements – assuming, of course, that they have some understanding of the operation of spreadsheets. That last assumption is significant because although, as Power (2004) has argued, there is a strong tendency within organisations for measurements and measuring instruments to be reified, trusted and unchallenged – it must be true because the system/database/spreadsheet/statistics says it is true – it is also the case that this tendency is less common in universities, where academics are far more likely to interrogate the “facts and figures” presented by senior management. In addition, whilst the reification and trust of numbers may be endemic (Porter, 1995) and not just confined to new forms of managerialism, there remains the observation that considerable work may go into the localised interpretation of measurements (Hughes et al., 2002). When we augment these points with the notion that many IT applications are inherently flexible (and not just subject to local “interpretive flexibility”) precisely because they are designed for a wide variety of uses and users, we arrive at a significant generic characteristic of IT-based work allocation models – namely that it takes a lot of work and effort to deconstruct a WAM. It also takes a lot of work and effort to unpick the foundations and assumptions buried beneath the invention of second order measures, to check the validity of first order measures, or to investigate the calculations used within spreadsheets, or field descriptors within a database. This is in addition to the work required to develop and implement the models. Such modelling activities are thus indeed similar to other aspects of managerialism and NPM, which require more work from members who wish to soften or resist their effects (Prichard and Willmott, 1997; Chandler, et al, 2004). However, we may further suggest that if academics want WAMs to be implemented with accountability and responsibility, so that the modelling and implementation activity is fully open to regular and proceduralised scrutiny, then that requires either more unpaid work for academics and others, or, preferably, it requires additional resources, additional employees, systems and procedures – in other words, increased bureaucracy. So, when faced with the pressures imposed by elements of managerialism, NPM and government targets, the only realistic response is to argue for increased bureaucracy – “if you want this done properly, put the resources in” – a clear echo of du Gay’s (2000) arguments for the bureaucratic ethos. Returning to Weber and Waters’ (1989) argument, collegiate structures will inevitably bow to pressures to bureaucratise. Perhaps the only thing that has changed since Waters formulated his argument is the apparently inexorable rise of the neo-liberal concept that “the market” can achieve co-ordination and allocation tasks more efficiently than bureaucracy. What we can see here is that “the market” only achieves such tasks “efficiently” at the expense of massively increased workloads, whether physical or emotional. 5. Conclusion One of the astonishing accomplishments of both governing political parties in the UK over the last 15 years has been the massive increase in the productivity of academic

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staff at virtually no cost to the government. For a variety of reasons, UK academic staff was, until 2004, extremely reluctant or unable to challenge these changes. Hopefully that is beginning to change, especially with the merger of the AUT and NATFHE, but great care needs to be taken with regard to what, exactly, we are arguing for – defence of some mythical, nostalgic “collegiality” should not be on the agenda, for a number of reasons: the spectre of “collegiality” is easily mobilised by the rhetoric of senior management and quangos. Waters’ (1989) more rigorous definition of collegiate structures, shows that such structures are redolent of a privileged status quo, the closure of expert authority, and other forms of inequality which bureaucracies can help dismantle. Work allocation models can in principle be used as a bargaining tool in negotiations over academic workloads. There are, however, wide variations in the current state of awareness and understanding of such models. If WAMs remain totally at the discretion of university senior management or heads of department, there will inevitably be a very wide range of outcomes, some quite unwelcome. Rather than trying to resist their implementation, academic staff might do better to argue for the requisite resources – additional staff, systems and procedures – to ensure that work allocation models are developed and implemented with full accountability and responsibility. Finally, we have also arrived at what is perhaps a startling conclusion with respect to the broader changes in UK higher education, whether we call these “managerialism” or new public management or the “McUniversity”. Namely, that in general they present university managers, staff and academics in particular, with an apparently unpalatable choice. They are faced with a requirement to develop, implement and if necessary challenge a range of new tasks, business processes, projects to be managed, teams to be led, new measures to be captured and calculated, and new ways of meeting new targets. For managers the choice is whether to increase the workloads of existing staff or to employ more staff. Academic staff, for their part, can either accept the increased workloads or to lobby (and hence work) for increased resources – however, the organisational context of the UK university system is such that “increased resources” is likely to entail further bureaucratization. The conclusion of this paper is that the latter may offer a more viable way forward than that implied by recourse to self-serving notions of “collegiality”. Notes 1. The data are from 38 universities in an informal trawl of colleagues, email lists, web-sites of universities, departments, AUT Local Associations and the QAA, and my own experience. Detailed models have been obtained from ten universities. This clearly needs reinforcing with a more formal survey. 2. Such as medical and business schools, and the “fragmented adhocracy” (Whitley, 2000) of management studies. References AUT (2003), “Model workload agreement”, AUT web site, available at: www.aut.org.uk/media/ pdf/workloadmodelagreement.pdf (accessed 2 February 2005). Barker, J.R. (1999), The Discipline of Teamwork: Participation and Concertive Control, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Baty, P. (2005a), “Staff stress could lead to court”, THES, No. 1674, 14 January 2005.

Baty, P. (2005b), “More than half cant cope with job stress”, THES, No. 1675, 21 January 2005, p. 5. Bowker, G.C. and Star, S.L. (2000), Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, MIT Press, London/Boston, MA. Callon, M. (1992), “The dynamics of techno-economic networks”, in Coombs, R., Saviotti, P. and Walsh, V. (Eds), Technological Change and Company Strategies, Academic Press, London. Chandler, J., Barry, J. and Clark, H. (2002), “Stressing academe: the wear and tear of the new public management”, Human Relations, Vol. 55 No. 9, pp. 1051-69. Danieli, A. and Thomas, A.B. (1999), “What about the workers? Studying the work of management educators and their orientations to management education”, Management Learning, Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 449-71. Dearlove, J. (1997), “The academic labour process: from collegiality and professionalism to managerialism and proletarianisation?”, Higher Education Review, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 56-75. Deem, R. (2001), “Globalisation, new managerialism, academic capitalism and entrepreneurism in universities: is the local dimension still important?”, Comparative Education, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 7-20. du Gay, P. (2000), In Praise of Bureaucracy, Sage, London. Dutton, W.H. (Ed.) (1996), Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Green, K., Hull, R., McMeekin, A. and Walsh, V. (1999), “Constructing the techno-economic: networks versus paradigms”, Research Policy, Vol. 28 No. 7, pp. 777-92. Hellstro˝m, T. (2004), “Between a rock and a hard place: academic institutional change and the problem of collective action”, Higher Education, Vol. 48 No. 4, pp. 511-28. Hood, C. (1995), “The new public management in the 1980s: variations on a theme”, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 20 Nos 2/3, pp. 93-109. Hopwood, A. and Miller, P. (Eds) (1994), Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Hughes, J.A., Rouncefield, M. and Tolmie, P. (2002), “Representing knowledge: instances of management information”, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 53 No. 2, pp. 221-38. Hull, R. (1998), “The complexity fad”, Futures, Vol. 29 No. 7, pp. 689-91. Hull, R. (2000a), “Knowledge management and the conduct of expert labour”, in Prichard, C., Chumer, M., Hull, R. and Willmott, H. (Eds), Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning, Critical Perspectives on Work & Organizations Series, Macmillan, London, pp. 49-68. Hull, R. (2000b), “Knowledge and the economy: some critical comments”, Economy & Society, Vol. 29 No. 2, pp. 316-31 (Essay Review of Economics and Utopia, by Geoffrey Hodgson, 1999). Hull, R. (2001), “ICTs and the knowledge economy: an historical and ethnographic study”, Unpublished PhD thesis, Manchester School of Management, UMIST, Manchester. Hull, R. and Kaghan, W. (2000), “Innovation – but for whose benefit, for what purpose?”, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 317-25. Jary, D. and Parker, M. (Eds) (1998), The New Higher Education: Issues and Directions for the Post-Dearing University, Staffordshire University Press, Staffordshire. Kinman, G. and Jones, F. (2004), Working to the Limit: Stress and Work-Life Balance in Academic and Academic-Related Employees in the UK, Association of University Teachers, London. Newton, J. (2002), “Barriers to effective quality management and leadership: case study of two academic departments”, Higher Education, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 185-212.

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Nyland, D. and Woolgar, S. (2002), “Accountability in action? The case of a database purchasing decision”, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 53 No. 2, pp. 259-74. Ogbonna, E. and Harris, L.C. (2004), “Work intensification and emotional labour among UK university lecturers: an exploratory study”, Organization Studies, Vol. 25 No. 7, pp. 1185-203. Parker, M. and Jary, D. (1995), “The McUniversity: organization, management and academic subjectivity”, Organization, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 319-38. Porter, T.M. (1995), Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Power, M. (2004), “Counting, control and calculation: reflections on measuring and management”, Human Relations, Vol. 57 No. 6, pp. 765-83. Prichard, C. and Willmott, H. (1997), “Just how managed is the McUniversity?”, Organization Studies, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 287-316. Rice, E. (2004), “Evaluation of change academy”, report presented to the UK Change Academy, available at: www.heacademy.ac.uk/quality/CA029D_IndependentEvaluation2004 ChangeAcademy.rtf (accessed 5 September 2005). Rip, A. and Groen, A.J. (2001), “Many visible hands”, in Coombs, R. et al. (Eds), Technology and the Market: Demand, Users and Innovation, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 12-37. Shore, C. and Wright, S. (2000), “Coercive accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher education”, in Strathern, M. (Ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, Routledge and EASA, London, pp. 57-89. Shumar, W. (1997), College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education, Falmer Press, London. Smyth, J. (Ed.) (1994), Academic Work: Changing Labour Process in Higher Education, Open University Press/Society for Research into Higher Education, Milton Keynes. Strathern, M. (Ed.) (2000), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, Routledge and European Association of Social Anthropologists, London. Trow, M. (1994), Managerialism and the Academic Profession: Quality and Control, Open University Quality Support Centre, London. UCEA (2004), Academic Role Profiles, University and Colleges Employers Association, available at: www.ucea.ac.uk/role_profiles_pre92.html (accessed 3 February 2005). Waters, M. (1989), “Collegiality, bureaucratization and professionalization: a weberian analysis”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94 No. 5, pp. 945-72. Whitley, R.D. (2000), The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, with revised Introduction (Originally published 1984), Clarendon Press, Oxford. Willmott, H. (1995), “Managing the academics: commodification and control in the development of university education in the UK”, Human Relations, Vol. 48 No. 9, pp. 993-1027. Further reading JFC (1997), Management Information for Decision Making: Costing Guidelines for Higher Education Institutions, Joint Funding Councils (Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, Higher Education Funding Council for England, Higher Education Funding Council for Wales). Miller, H. (1991), “Academics and their labour process”, in Smith, C., Knights, D. and Willmott, H.C. (Eds), White-Collar Work: The Non-Manual Labour Process, Macmillan, London.

Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. (1997), Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Transparency Review Steering Group (1999), “Transparency review of research: proposals for a new uniform approach to costing of research and other activities in universities and colleges in higher education”, Report to the Science and Engineering Base Co-ordinating Committee, available at: www.shefc.ac.uk/publications/other/costing/contents.html (accessed 28 January 2005). About the author Richard Hull is Senior Lecturer in Management with the University of Newcastle upon Tyne Business School. His research has focussed on the social history of computing, the development and use of IT in organisations, knowledge management, and science communication. His current research areas are digital TV, medical informatics, the conduct of expert labour, critical management studies, and more broadly in the social theory and philosophy underpinning social and historical studies of science, technology and organisation. He is co-editor of the collections Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning (Macmillan) and Knowledge and Innovation in the New Service Economy (Edward Elgar).

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From bureaucratic to post-bureaucratic: the difficulties of transition

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Emmanuel Josserand University Paris – Dauphine, Paris, France

Stephen Teo School of Management, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and

Stewart Clegg Faculty of Business, School of Management, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Abstract Purpose – Modern bureaucracies are under reconstruction, bureaucracy being no longer “modern”; they are becoming “post” bureaucratic. Defining the post-bureaucratic organization as a hybrid form provides insight into the intrinsic difficulties involved in the refurbishment of large complex organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine these difficulties empirically. Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the case of an Australian public sector agency, subject to “corporatization” – a metamorphosis from a strictly public sector outlook to one that was imputedly more commercial. It focuses on the transition from personnel management to strategic HRM in the HR function. Findings – A series of difficulties affected these changes: difficulties in inventing a new identity; differences in perception of that identity; organizational philosophy towards strategic HRM; unsuitability of extent networks; and identity conflicts. Two factors emerge as the core explanation for the difficulties encountered: the “stickiness of identity” and the difficulties associated with network development. Originality/value – The paper outlines the difficulties experienced in the putative “refurbishment” of a large public sector agency as it made its way to “corporatization”. Keywords Bureaucracy, Organizational change, Public sector organizations, Australia Paper type Research paper

Journal of Organizational Change Management Vol. 19 No. 1, 2006 pp. 54-64 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810610643686

Introduction More than a simple exercise in reinvention, the post-bureaucratic era is characterized by hybridity. Far from being the end of bureaucracy, the post-modern area is that of its refurbishment (Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). The post-bureaucratic configuration interpolates the Weberian ideal-type with democratic principles. Bureaucracy dominated the last century, and despite a vibrant debate about its demise towards the end of the last century, it is by no means clear that it has been superseded (Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). Conceptions of post-bureaucracy combine elements of an organic structure (Burns and Stalker, 1961) with changed modalities of more indirect and internalised forms of control, as writers such as Heydebrand (1989, p. 345) and Sewell (1998, p. 408) suggest. The concept of post-bureaucracy is centred on unobtrusive peer-based teamwork controls (Sewell, 1998; Barker, 1999; Black and Edwards, 2000; Fairtlough, 1994; Miles and Snow, 1996). Hence, the HR function is

evidently central to their implementation. The refurbished bureaucracy is an original combination of old types in a dynamic perceived as new, leaving a management whose identity was formed in the old ways of doing and being disconcerted as to how to implement the changes in their identity that are demanded. The combination of apparently opposite ideal-types can only be accounted for if we acknowledge the fragmented nature of organizations and organizational structures.

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Entering post-bureaucracy: an impossible injunction The rationalization process underlying Weber’s bureaucratic ideal-type has been widely criticized both by sociology and management scholars. As argued by Clegg and Courpasson (2004), the process of rationalization inherent in past bureaucratization resulted in a diminution of freedom as officers were expected to become obedient subjects, encased in an “iron cage”. From the perspective of “late modern” management theory, such bureaucratic organizations would be less efficient than those organizations which foster the empowerment of employees (Osborne and Plastrik, 1997; Child and McGrath, 2001) and the decentralization of authority (Child and McGrath, 2001; Josserand, 2004). In such organizations strategic planning processes would assumes a more creative and open form, while control within organizations would have to be softened (Lenz and Lyles, 1985; Marx, 1991; Mintzberg, 1993). The other important feature that this theory discerns in the post-bureaucratic organization is the importance of networks or cross-cutting links between members (Mintzberg, 1980; Doz and Prahalad, 1991; Hedlund, 1994; Dess et al., 1995; Frost, 2001; Gooderham and Ulset, 2002; Josserand, 2004). These changes allow organizational learning to increase (Starbuck, 1992; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1994; Nonaka, 1994; Hermes, 1999; Gupta and Govindarajan, 2000; Ravasi and Verona, 2001; Foss, 2002), leading to more innovative and flexible organizations. The overall picture of the post-bureaucratic organization sees it as decentralized with cohesion obtained through cross-cutting networks of various kinds, and in which the role of management shifts to being a catalyst (Hedlund, 1994; Josserand, 2004). Interesting as this new ideal-type may be, it portrays an abstract representation of post-bureaucracy. Rather than disappearing, bureaucracy resurfaces in a hybrid form, like a ghost lurking in the machinery of the network or, as Michels (1962) would see it, inside the democratic principles. Hence, the post-bureaucratic organization can be considered as an organization where the network logic (Eccles and Crane, 1987; Jarillo, 1988; Bradach and Eccles, 1989; Powell, 1990) contributes significantly to cohesion (Josserand, 2004). The network logic involves the managerial denomination of political democracy through self-determination and mutual adjustments. The post-bureaucratic organization is not free from the Weberian ideal-type but combines the old rationalization mechanisms with new principles of networks and democracy. The classical political studies of de Tocqueville (1996) on American democracy and Michels (1962) on political parties demonstrate the necessary intricacy of democracy and autocracy or polycracy (Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). Post-bureaucracy does not mean the end of domination (Herrschaft) but it does mean that organizations and their management are caught in intrinsically ambiguous democratic mechanisms. Where legitimacy is premised on a political principle of democracy, it sits oddly within the frame of an older legitimacy of the power of office as (a legitimate) authority. In the former,

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domination is abhorred; in the latter it is inescapable, which changes dramatically the functioning of the line of command. Control in a late modern post-bureaucratic organization means finding a balance between planning influence – or input control – and control influence – or output control (Goold and Campbell, 1987). In such an approach, management overlooks a fragmentation of power. The introduction of democratic principles jeopardizes the vertical structuring of the organization in at least two ways. On the one hand, output control in a decentralized organization does not provide a dynamic for the development of networks. It results only in the introduction of a competition that induces more fragmentation. On the other hand, managers are confronted with a situation where imperative authority and its fiat is no longer a solution. The development of crosscutting networks implies an active and interactive commitment of the personnel. In a sense, the injunction to build networks can be linked to the more fundamental and paradoxical injunction to “be spontaneous” (Watzlawick et al., 1975). The control and power mechanisms of the modern organization are thus at a loss when the post-bureaucratic stakes shift. In such a situation, attempts to articulate a rejuvenating vision at a macro level are very likely to end up in a misunderstanding of local implications (Stokes and Clegg, 2002). Hence, if managers are caught in the ambiguous dialectics of democracy and bureaucracy, then it may be necessary for them to articulate their visions at both the micro-level and at the level of more generalised visions. Role transition and network in the process of post-bureaucratization Role transition theory (Ashforth, 2000; Ashforth and Saks, 1995; Nicholson, 1984) can be considered an appropriate lens with which to observe organizational change (Ashforth and Saks, 1995; Allen et al., 1995). Organizational change requires individuals or subgroups within the organization to modify their role and adjust their knowledge base (Allen et al., 1995; Nicholson, 1984; Ashforth and Saks, 1995). Organizational change requires both personal and role development (Nicholson, 1984; West, 1987); it is characterized by both novelty (difficulties in making proper use of previous knowledge, skills and habits) and discretion (slack on role requirements). Personal development refers to individuals changing in order to fit the role, while role development involves changing the role in order to fit the individual. Major organizational changes require individuals to develop both aspects, a mode of adjustment labelled “exploration” in Nicholson’s (1984) model. Methodology The research investigates a tentative post-bureaucratic evolution, following corporatization, within Statecorp (a pseudonym), a large multi-divisional Australian public sector entity. In Australia, the implementation of commercialization typically begins with the adoption of commercialized practices, starting with the “half-way house” of corporatization, and arriving at a final stage where the entity concerned is fully privatized. After commercialization, Statecorp underwent a period of change. These changes included structural change (from geographical to multi-divisional form), decentralization and devolution of managerial processes, and the creation of a small corporate core. New senior executives were appointed for the strategic planning and HRM functions. There was also a reduction in the numbers of personnel employed at Statecorp, from 18,000 to 11,000.

Focussing on the HR function In this study we focus on the evolution of the HR function. An important feature of corporatization is the adoption of a strategic approach to people management, as opposed to traditional bureaucratic public personnel management (Perry, 1993; Teo, 2000). Prior to corporatization (Time 1), there was a strong public sector culture entrenched in Statecorp, expressed particularly in the administration of its personnel management. After corporatization (Time 2), external consultants conducted two organization-wide reviews of HR. They highlighted the weaknesses of the people management function and prompted the management to restructure the function to take on a more strategic approach, commencing with a name change to human resource management. The top management team formally endorsed a strong desire to make the function more strategic. Data collection We started observations in 1995, when the principle of corporatization was introduced, before the launch of the HRM reform in February 1996. Research observations were completed in 1998 after the HRM reform had been carried out. The main data sources used were semi-structured interviews with all the HR managers and a sample of stakeholders. Other sources included analysis and coding of meeting agendas and minutes of the organization’s HR planning, attendance at 29 HR meetings, and the collection of documents such as internal memos, annual budgets, HR plans and strategic plans. A total of 97 interviews were conducted with a sample of 79 key informants in the organization (comprising 25 senior managers, 15 individuals from corporate HR, 11 individuals with strategic planning responsibilities, 17 line-level HR practitioners, 5 line managers, and 6 trade union officials). Data collection was structured by a longitudinal approach, the objective of which was to compare an organizational phenomenon between two periods in time and to analyse the transformation process (Menard, 1991). Eighteen key actors (e.g. General Manager Corporate HR and his direct reporting line and some of the senior executives) were interviewed twice: once in Time 1 and once in Time 2. The other actors were interviewed once in time two, part of the interview being thus retrospective. The main questions discussed with the interviewees were as follows: general strategic orientation, role of the corporate and strategic business unit (henceforth SBU) HR, stakeholders’ relationships with HR, and sources of amelioration for HR. Data treatment Interviews were analysed through methods of qualitative inquiry (Miles and Huberman, 1994). To code the content of the interview transcripts, we used 42 categories, such as: business strategy, alignment between business and HR planning, corporate HR roles, business partners. A special focus was put on characterizing HR role. Ulrich (1997) provides an integrative framework with which to analyse the strategic evolution of the HRM function. The traditional operational HR (personnel) focus was associated with two major roles: employee champion and administrative expert. By contrast, the emerging strategic role focuses on corporate change, in which the HRM manager plays a leading role. In the strategic view, HR specialists must become business partners to line

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managers by providing them with strategic advice (Walker, 1998; Ulrich, 1997; Hall and Torrington, 1998; Teo and Rodwell, 2003). Coding was performed by three academics. The inter-coder reliability score (Miles and Huberman, 1994, p. 64) was in the range of 75-80 percent, thus being consistent with the standard recommended.

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Case study findings Some major changes are introduced in the organization . . . A number of organizational changes were introduced to focus the HRM function into a more strategic orientation. The HR function was restructured to allow the corporate HR unit to enhance its contribution and input into the strategic decision-making processes. The roles and responsibilities of the restructured corporate HR unit included the following expectations: Corporate HR will contribute towards the analysis of the organization’s vision and direction, and any external directions and trends, for HR implications and provide corporate HR strategies to achieve that vision; provide corporate leadership for the HR function in Statecorp; and provide HR policies and mechanisms that support senior management in achieving Statecorp’s goals. In addition, the HR strategy committee was formed to strategically focus and bring together the HR elements of Statecorp in a co-ordinated and integrated manner to improve business outcomes (Statecorp Internal Document).

After corporatization, the Group General Manager HR resigned and one of the SBU HR executives was appointed as the GM, corporate HR, an individual with extensive knowledge of personnel management operational services, the industry and a personal friend of the CEO. For the restructuring of the corporate HR function, an external consultant formulated a role statement, with involvement from key stakeholders in the HRM function (including senior executives and line managers). In parallel, operational HR activities were decentralized at the SBU-level. There was also a separation of the personnel/administration function from the policy and strategy function within SBU HR units. The main aim was to allow the SBU HRM units to devote more time and effort to strategic issues. A workforce planning methodology was put into place in mid-1997 to achieve a closer linkage between the strategic plan and the workforce plan. A HR Strategy Planning Forum was created. Regrouping four senior corporate HR executives and eight SBU HR managers was presented as an avenue of strategic dialogue about the implications of corporate-wide business strategies on people management. . . . with very limited change While there was a strong desire, both within the HRM function and organization-wide, to close the gap between strategic planning and people management, a very limited change actually took place. During Time 1 informal HR managers meetings existed to discuss operational issues. The HR Strategy Planning Forum did not fundamentally change the outcome of meetings. While most respondents agreed that there was some form of strategic discussion in the forum, they were sceptical in regard to its overall effectiveness. SBU HR managers proved much more comfortable with discussing operational issues. As summed up by several SBU HR managers, the main reason was due to the personnel administration background among members of the forum. In addition, SBU managers commented on the evident lack of business knowledge, while

the corporate practitioners commented on the lack of strategic orientation within the group. More generally, when asked about the effectiveness of the restructure of the people management function, several members commented wryly that “nothing has changed”. For both time periods, 44 respondents gave a description of the key role played by the corporate HR unit that matched features of the administrative expert role. Most of these respondents indicated that the corporate HR unit was mainly concerned with complying with public sector personnel management policies and processes and government legislation in both Time 1 and Time 2. It appeared that corporate HR’s emphasis was still focusing on the efficient and effective delivery of personnel activities. There was an overall consensus among informants that the corporate HR’s change agent role was less than effective. While most respondents, irrespective of their functional status and organizational seniority, agreed that the corporate HR unit had a role in ensuring that the organization’s HR had the right commercial skills and mindsets, the corporate HR unit did little to ensure employees shift their mindsets. A common perception was that the corporate HR unit had not actively engaged with line managers in managing change. The results were only slightly more encouraging as far as the strategic role was concerned. There was a perception among some of the senior line managers that this strategic business partnership was an organizational rhetoric in Time 2. However, some respondents (particularly those who had a direct working relationship with the corporate HR unit) noted that corporate- and group-level HR practitioners had become more involved in the planning process. Despite this increased role in the formal process, the informal links between the HR practitioners and line managers were still considered insufficient. It was a view expressed by the majority of respondents from the strategic planning unit as well as senior managers from the SBU. Surprisingly, a number of the respondents from the corporate HR unit also made the same evaluation concerning the less than satisfactory link between corporate HR and the SBU line managers. Hence, if some of the formal processes did induce a minimum level of alignment in the strategy formulation process, we were far from the development of rich business-advice links. The research question came into evident focus: RQ1. Why did these difficulties occur in changing role identities? The following sections highlight four significant factors in answering this question. Difficulties in inventing the role Writing the first lines of the new strategic role proved to be a delicate exercise for the HR practitioners. Some of the defensive behaviours predicted by role transition theory (Allen et al., 1995; Nicholson, 1984; Ashforth and Saks, 1995) emerged in the organization, including the perception that HR people could become belligerent. For many interviewees, this defiance could be explained by the limited competence of SBU HR practitioners. Line managers commented on the lack of business knowledge, a perspective corroborated by corporate HR practitioners, who criticized the line HR units for lacking strategic orientation. There was general agreement that the strategic skills of these practitioners was limited.

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Differences in role perception An important impediment to the development of a strategic role for HR practitioners was the different role perceptions of actors within the organization. A majority of actors tended to rely more on the perception of HR as they had always known it. The perception of HR in time 1 was extremely operational. Several interviewees implied that the contribution of the HR function was only to provide the workforce planning figures for Statecorp’s corporate plan. What is striking is the fact that this representation of HR survived the institutional changes; there was in Time 2 still a perception that “strategic HRM” was all about getting the workforce planning figures right. The expectations of line managers were thus derived from an outmoded perception of the HR function. There was a real difference in perceptions between corporate HR’s expected roles, multiple stakeholders’ perceptions, and the enacted roles. Organizational philosophy towards strategic HRM Integrating the HRM function into the strategic management process proved difficult. One reason seemed to be that line managers lacked a philosophy that treated HR as an important resource for the organization. Interviews with these stakeholders implied that during Time 1 and Time 2 there was a lack of emphasis on HR as a source of competitive advantage. The fundamental incapacity to change in regard to the treatment of people can be linked to Statecorp’s bureaucratic and technical culture. Statecorp had an essentially engineering culture which was perceived as inducing a “insensitive and uncaring” way of handling human issues. Leadership was thus crucial in ensuring the HR philosophy was present within the strategic management process. Developing new networks is not easy The situation we observed at Statecorp was one which inhibited networking between SBU HR specialists and line managers. HR specialists exhibited a very limited capacity to engage in a meaningfully “strategic” dialogue with these managers, and there was very little transfer of experience from the few HR specialists who had succeeded in doing so. The differing expectations of line management and HR appear to have exacerbated the difficulties encountered at the corporate HR level. Our research shows the importance of individual role expectations for the development of a “strategic” role for HR at Statecorp. It also shows that the articulation of individual and collective levels are essential in the understanding the process of network formation (Granovetter, 1978; Gabbay and Leenders, 2001). Finally, the difficulties encountered can also be understood as a failure to develop the requisite forms of social capital (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Greve and Salaff, 2001). Role conflicts The change led to role ambiguities that resulted in role conflicts between the new corporate and SBU HR units. These were caused by the decentralization and devolution of operational and functional aspects of HRM. HR informants criticized corporate HR for not “letting go” of some of the operational and functional activities (such as recruitment and selection). SBU HR practitioners were thus “caught in the middle” as they tried to resolve the issues faced by line managers as well as supporting corporate level HR policies.

Identity is sticky The above analysis shows that very substantial changes were made at Statecorp; however, our investigation shows that these were of very limited effectiveness. The paper has identified a number of role ambiguities and uncertainties in relation to the change observed at Statecorp (Caldwell, 2003; Turner, 1990), and it is apparent that the question of role change for the HR specialists implied a struggle with the stickiness of their previous identity. HR specialists faced a partial change in their institutional role, but struggled to embody these in their symbolic interactionist role dimensions (Ashforth, 2000). Statecorp’s attempt to modify the role of HR was managed through an imposed consensus which was inherently fragile and provisional (Goffman, 1959; Martin and Frost, 1996). HR professionals had difficulties in endorsing the new role. Lack of confidence in it was reflected in the reactions of line managers, who did not consider the HR specialists to be business interlocutors, with the result that the latter were systematically driven back to a role symbolized by administrative operational tasks. The position of the HR specialists was fundamentally unsuited to “strategic” dialogue with line managers. A main difficulty encountered by HR specialists was the inadequacy of their initial social links, a relational issue crystallized at the level of each individual and amplified by the divergent expectations of diverse stakeholders within the organisation (Granovetter, 1978; Gabbay and Leenders, 2001). Conclusion At Statecorp, personnel bureaucrats were not easily turned into strategists. The difficulties experienced in the transition towards post-bureaucracy included difficulties in inventing a new role, differences in perceptions of the identity, contrasting organizational philosophies, unsuited networks and evident conflicts focused on the stickiness of role identity. HR specialists were thus entangled in the nets of their extant social ties. The research carried out at Statecorp raises a number of theoretical issues. It would appear that post-bureaucracy may be a concept harder to implement than early theorizations might have implied, and it is apparent that “the difficulties of transition” are substantially affected by the presence or absence of the requisite social capital (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Greve and Salaff, 2001). It would also appear that history weighs heavily when trying to change the characteristics of well-established roles and routines; it is apparent that the capacity to develop more open and proactive management styles cannot be simply imposed on a “top down” basis. There is a need for further research on how the process of network formation may be enabled or constrained by role transitions. We have already noted that the fundamental characteristic of post-bureaucratic refurbishment is that of organisational hybridity. The changes we observed at Statecorp are redolent of this hybridity and it would appear that the emergence of new and more flexible organizational forms will depend on inherently complex, and intractable processes which occur within bureaucracy itself. References Allen, D.A., Freeman, D.M., Reizenstein, R.C. and Rentz, J.O. (1995), “Just another transition? Examining survivors’ attitudes over time”, Academy of Management Proceedings. Ashforth, B.E. (2000), Role Transitions in Organizational Life: An Identity-based Perspective, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.

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A structurationist analysis of post-bureaucracy in modernity and late modernity Louise Briand

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Accounting Department, Universite´ du Que´bec en Outaouais, Que´bec, Canada, and

Guy Bellemare Industrial Relations Department, Universite´ du Que´bec en Outaouais, Que´bec, Canada Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use case study evidence to show that post-bureaucracy is less marked by a discontinuity in surveillance than by its displacement and intensification. Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the complex changes that occurred at the International Development Research Center, a Canadian public corporation. Findings – Fundamental clash of values is evident. The reform has brought about a “new order” which relies on a centralized model of governance. Moves towards the “post-bureaucratic organization” have entailed intensified surveillance and produced a new structure of domination. Originality/value – The paper argues that Anthony Giddens’ theories of late modernity and structuration contain elements that explain the emergence of new organizational forms, their continuity and transformation. Keywords Bureaucracy, Organizational change, Public sector organizations, Canada Paper type Case study

Introduction In recent years, management theorists have pointed to the emergence of new organizational forms departing from vertical command structures, and turning to horizontal collaborative models, in an attempt to make organizations more flexible and responsive to fluctuating environments, and to unleash workers’ initiative. New organizational forms are often associated with knowledge-intensive firms, since the knowledge economy symbolizes: . the appearance of new industrial sectors and new forms of work (Jones, 2003); . the reappraisal of control mechanisms and the search for new bases of legitimacy (Hodgson, 2004; Ka¨rrerman and Alvesson, 2004; Courpasson and Dany, 2003; Robertson and Swan, 2003; Maravelias, 2003; MacKenzie, 2002); and . the emergence of concrete means to form networks of enterprises through the dissemination of new information and communication technologies (Castells, 2001). It is in essence in this context that the post-bureaucratic model has developed (Heckscher and Donnellon, 1994): a model characterized by fewer hierarchical levels, shifting intra- and extra-organizational boundaries, recourse to a contingent labour

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force (contract workers, subcontractors, etc.), teamwork and consensual decision-making (Grey and Garsten, 2001). Although there is general agreement on the general characteristics of the model, post-bureaucracy raises questions and doubts. The transformations it involves have generally been under-documented, they are the subject of little theorizing (Courpasson and Reed, 2004) and they create ambiguity (Ra¨isa¨nen and Linde, 2004; Briand and Bellemare, 2006; Ka¨rrerman et al., 2002). Specifically, the effects of post-bureaucracy are in doubt, since it is said to emancipate the actors from bureaucratic rule and control of their behaviour, but also to “subordinate individuals” thoughts, emotions and identities to its instrumental schemes (see Maravelias, 2003 for a discussion of the two dominant discourses). In this paper, we suggest that organizational transformations can be explained by the mutations and displacement of surveillance created in modernity. Based on a case study, we also demonstrate that organizational forms have to be investigated in the light of the integration practices prevailing within a social system and the relations of which they are part. Moreover, we argue that the search for theoretical definitions of structures, practices and relations associated with post-bureaucracy should leave room for the definition of a general model that can explain organizational changes and continuities, as well as capture the rules, practices and relations of a specific social system. We suggest that the theories of late modernity and structuration provide an analytical framework which facilitates the in-depth investigation and understanding of a social system. We first provide a brief analysis of organizational forms and surveillance in modernity and late modernity. We then present the case study of an organization that, in the early 1990s, adopted a post-bureaucratic structure. We analyze this transformation and attempt to understand its effects. We conclude by summarizing the contributions of the structurationist analysis to the study of organizational transformations and propose some avenues for future research. Organizational transformations, modernity and late modernity According to Giddens (1990, 1991), the rise of the organization is a general feature of modernity. Modern organizations are constituted by, and make up, the capacity for “reflexive surveillance” of actions over indefinite spans of time-space. In organizations, surveillance associated with management control practices takes two forms. The first form is the direct supervision of the work of subordinates by superiors. The second, more subtle but equally important, consists of gathering information in order to govern, coordinate and control actions over time-space. These forms of surveillance constitute an administrative means to reproduce a governance system (Dandeker, 1990). In late modernity, which is characterized by the increasing production of knowledge, practices of social organization tend to radicalize. Giddens (1976, 1990) attributes this to: . the reflexivity and competence of agents; . the impossibility of obtaining systematic knowledge about social organizations; . the organizational strength of abstract systems and the autonomy conferred upon them by this strength;

. .

the globalization of risks and threats in societies; and the “problem of order”, that is, wanting to control everything instead of managing risks.

Management control practices in this context become integration practices that: . rely on the forces of modernity (separation of time and space, disembedding of social relations, reflexivity); . generate and integrate institutionalized features of modernity (capitalism, industrialism, administrative power); . help to create trust and increase surveillance; . are structured by relations of absence and presence; and . are constantly re-examined and reformed in light of new knowledge about these practices which constitutively alter their character. (For a socio-historical analysis of management control, Briand, 2001.) Thus, organizational transformations can be explained by the reform of management control practices (such as accountancy and bureaucratic rule), their replacement by diverse trends ranging from post-formal models (enterprise culture, management of emotions) to new authoritarian models (Briand, 2001; Bellemare, 1995). More recent transformations attest to the efforts made to “tame the uncontrollable” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) (for example, project management to control enterprises, made up of self-organized teams working in networks outside units of time or space). Post-bureaucracy: an illustrative case study Method Structurationist analysis implies that a social system be conceptualised as a duality: the structure (rules and resources) of a social system is both the conditions and the result of the activities of the participants in this system (Giddens, 1984). Analytically, this duality of structure requires that rules, resources and social relationships be conceptualized separately, so as to bring out the integration practices that govern their linkages. Thus, structurationist analysis is based on the description and interpretation of empirical data about the “mutual knowledge” of a social system, the knowledge of “how to go on” shared by lay actors and sociological observers of a given social system; it is an amalgam of conventions derived from shared meaning and the specialised knowledge introduced by the activity of experts (Giddens, 1976). In an organization, “mutual knowledge” refers to integration practices (corporate strategy, organizational structure, budget, performance indicators, etc.) that ensure the governance and/or coordination and/or surveillance of collective activity. For example, the annual budget, although mainly surveillance of expected results, can also be conceptualized as a governance mechanism, because it constitutes the monetary expression of the enterprise’s strategic directions. It is also a tool, which facilitates the coordination of the activity of several actors. The budget is a practice through which reciprocal relations can be established among the actors; as such, it is an integration practice.

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But structurationist analysis cannot be limited to the description and interpretation of integration practices (Giddens, 1976, 1984): it must include a critical component that will lead to an understanding of the constitution of social systems. Because integration practices rely on and support rules, resources and social relationships, the second component of the analysis of integration practices involves the interpretation of the links between the dimensions of the duality of structure, in order to show how and why practices develop and are transformed. To sum up, structurationist analysis means that integration practices must be examined through the description of “activities of day-to-day life”, that they can be interpreted through the translation of “mutual knowledge”, and explained through the conversion of empirical data gathered within the established conceptual framework. It should be underlined that structurationist analysis is not a linear process but is based on a continual to-and-fro motion between the data gathered and the analytical dimensions of the theory. The structurationist analysis of a social system may therefore be represented by the intersection of two frameworks of meaning (that of the “meaningful social world made up of lay actors”, and that of the theory of structuration) (Figure 1). Thus, structurationist analysis allows us to document and theorise about a social system, while respecting the operating conventions specific to the system concerned as an integral part of the behavior of the actors who are part of it. The analysis is therefore based on and is in line with the concept of the duality of structure. The case study The case study was conducted from May 12, 1997 to March 27, 1998. The techniques used for gathering the data were examination of the organization’s documents, interviews and non-participant observation. We conducted an exhaustive review of

SUBJECT

RESEARCHER’S ACTIVITIES

SOCIAL SYSTEM

Shared meaning

Activity of day-today life

Specialised knowledge

Description

Mutual knowledge Interpretation

Integration practices Integration practices Rules and resources Structuration Intended and unintended consequences

Figure 1. Case study process from the structurationist perspective

Social relations

Reflexive monitoring of action

Explanation

Competence Agent

Source : Briand, 2001, p. 91.

annual reports (1970-1997) and of 116 archived documents and a thorough examination of the organization’ network (“W Drive”) and web site. Thirty-nine in-depth interviews were conducted with 36 persons, of whom four were senior managers, nine were directors (three retired), fifteen were professionals and eight were support staff. Non-participant observation involved 171 days at the organization’s head office in Ottawa (Canada). Observations were gathered while attending formal and informal meetings, having lunch in the corporate dining room, attending aerobic classes at the fitness center and simply observing day-to-day activity. The organization The case study concerns the International Development Research Center (henceforth “the Center”), a public corporation established in 1970 by the Parliament of Canada with a mission to generate and apply new knowledge to meet the challenges facing developing countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean. As the first President put it: The International Development Research Center is a public corporation. Within the familiar framework of corporate organization, we are the directors; our shareholders, the people of Canada; our clients, the world’s poor (Hopper, 1970, p. 1).

As a member of Canada’s international policy community, the center works collaboratively with a number of federal government departments, especially Foreign Affairs Canada and the Canadian International Development Agency. It is guided by an international Board of Governors and it reports to Parliament through the Minister of Foreign Affairs. This appeared to be an ideal organization for investigating and illustrating theories of late modernity and structuration. It had dealt with one of the main characteristics of modernity, i.e. reflexive surveillance over indefinite spans of time-space since it has its head office in Canada and regional offices in Cairo, Dakar, Delhi, Montevideo, Nairobi, and Singapore. The center also appeared relevant for understanding and explaining the reproduction and transmutation of bureaucratic structures since it is 35 years old (27 when the field work began) and it is a labor-intensive and knowledge-intensive organization: it employs scientists in natural and social sciences (food and agriculture, health, social and information scientists). Moreover, the center revealed itself to be very significant for exploring and questioning the emergence of post-bureaucracy, since senior management was already engaged in a search for an alternative to bureaucracy and to management control. As a director put it: One thing that to me is very very interesting, one thing that is going on now, is this movement, in the last 5 to 8 years, to get rid of hierarchy and management control, going from “you’re in my power because I’m your boss” to “sharing the power and devolution of responsibility down”. And we’ve gotten in that band wagon here at IDRC.

However, despite its desire for change, senior management had always struggled to remain in control. As stated by its treasurer (1973-2000): From the beginning, the president intentionally gave power to the program officers over the content of the projects but it was clear that the program officers would not have power over the financials of the projects. We would have gotten in trouble in no time. He said to me: it is your problem. It was intentional.

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The data collected (especially through interviews and annual reports review) revealed two main stages in the evolution of the center’s organizational structure (1970-1991 and 1991-1997). We present their main features under the headings of the “Bureaucratic Period” and the “Post-bureaucratic Period”. Though there was a transition period, there is insufficient space to describe it here. Our narrative therefore does not demonstrate convincingly the continuities in surveillance; a full case study narrative and discussion is to be found in Briand (2001). The bureaucratic period The center was created in May 1970. Under its incorporating act, it is managed by an international Board of Governors, which determines its strategic directions and policies. At its inaugural meeting, the board presented the center as the symbol of a “new style of international operation” and established that the center would give priority to listening to what those in the developing countries consider to be relevant. In practice programming would therefore evolve in response to proposals from recipients (researchers in the developing countries), that is, “project by project.” This strategy was based on the premises that it was necessary to build up the research capacity of scientists and technologists in the developing countries and that the scientists and technologists were the best judges of their needs. Originally, the management team was made up of the center’s president, a treasurer, secretary, director of administration and the directors of the program areas or divisions. The program divisions were established on the basis of disciplines (e.g. agriculture, food and nutrition sciences, population and health sciences, social sciences and human resources, and information sciences) and included program officers and administrative staff. Regional offices were established in the developing countries in 1972-1973, in order to immerse officers in the specific context of the regions themselves and to bring them closer to the recipients. In view of this strategy and organizational structure, the powers related to delivery were generally divided up as follows: the officers received proposals from recipients, submitted projects to their directors and the governors approved them. However, beyond the delegation of powers, it is important to underline the program delivery’s distinctive characteristics. It requires a large, highly qualified work force since the center provides the projects with support that tends to be more specialized than financial; the program officers not only receive proposals, but participate in defining the research projects and monitor their progress. Thus, the relationship between the program officers and recipients is based on intellectual exchange. In addition, the program officers must establish good relations with foreign institutions or ministries in order to ensure the project’s success. Internally, program delivery gave rise to many fundamental exchanges about the projects, mainly between the officers and their directors but also between the officers and the governors. Under the center’s incorporating act, a majority of the Board of Governors must be scientists (in the natural or social sciences or technology) or experts in international development. The participation of Canadian academics and private corporations can only be considered if the actors in the developing countries ask for it. The treasurer exercises budgetary control over the programs through the annual program of work and budget (PWB) but the budget allocations can be renegotiated in order to, as far as possible, follow up all worthy research proposals. Thus, the PWB is a

tool for the surveillance of the center’s activity, but one that is flexible. While the number of divisions and regional centers varied and hierarchical levels were added and taken away between 1970 and 1991, functional division and hierarchical organization formed the cornerstone of the center’s organizational structure for the entire period. The post-bureaucratic period Under the pressure of economic recession in the early 1990s, the Canadian government became increasingly preoccupied with domestic problems, and “aid fatigue” (Mohiddin, 1993) arose. The center was entering a “new stage of its existence” (IDRC Annual Report 1991-1992). As stated by a retired director: In this time [early-1990s] of what we call fiscal restraints, development paradigm had been shifted. Shifted from what? I’m not sure. It has never been clearly stated. But the paradigm shifted to aid fatigue. In our society, we had to have a different model for delivering our programs (. . .) you can go into any government department today and see the very same thing happening: go to industry, go to defence, to agriculture, to natural resources, the very same model. So you come to wonder if the deputy ministers were getting instructions from privy council office (PCO).

Faced with the challenges of making Canadians aware of the center and demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency, the newly-appointed president initiated a series of changes: a corporate services branch was created; staff numbers were reduced (from 418 person-years on March 31, 1991 to 316 in 1992); divisions were merged; management levels were collapsed (from five to three); and performance indicators (set and monitored by the treasurer) were introduced. The reorganization involved centralization of administrative services, since support staff from the discipline-based divisions were integrated into the resources branch. In addition, as of 1992, all positions were filled with two-year term contracts, which could be renewed as needed. Thus, senior management’s intention was to provide itself with “contingent labour.” In 1993, a three-year institutional program (corporate strategy and program framework) was adopted to refocus the center’s activity. This involved changing the delegation of powers. Henceforth, senior management would be responsible for approving projects, while the governors would concentrate on periodic progress reports, i.e. on the main aspects of the programs rather than on specific activities or projects. However, all of these changes were only a prelude to what would prove to be a more substantial reform. Between 1994 and 1996, the parliamentary grant was reduced by $46 million (from $142M to $96M). To compensate for the grant reduction, expenditures were once again rationalized, positions were cut, activities were outsourced (publication, coordination of the fitness center and the employee assistance program), income diversification activities were instituted (research contracts, project co-funding) and agreements were reached with other organizations to recover the cost of certain activities (travellers’ clinic, travel services). In July 1995, the divisions were abolished and a new organizational structure was adopted. It is made up of three branches (programs, corporate services, resources), the office of the president and the regional offices. This was a major change, which reflected a desire to establish a more flexible structure. The corporate services branch and the resources branch continued to be organized functionally, with a defined hierarchical structure, i.e. a vice-president, directors, professionals and support staff. The programs branch, on the other hand, was

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structured very differently. The programs are delivered by 15 units called “program initiatives”, i.e. teams that include program officers from different disciplines working on 15 targeted problem areas. Program officers can participate in two or three teams. There are no decision-makers or leaders on these teams, which attests to the desire to abandon a hierarchical organization. A director said: So now we’ve got those PIs [Program initiatives]. Now if you go and look at the way these PIs work, they are very . . . There is a tremendous cost because nobody is in charge. They have to talk ad discuss and even then when it is time for closure and movement . . . Well nobody has really got the responsibility and they [program officers] have divided loyalties because one person is on several PIs, at least 2 PIs.

Analysis The reform of the center includes most of the characteristics usually attributed to post-bureaucratic organization: . reduction of hierarchical levels, in particular in the programs branch where the structure was resolutely flattened; . weakening of the intra- and extra-organizational boundaries, through the abolition of discipline-based divisions in favor of multidisciplinary work teams, and through the creation of the corporate services branch whose mission is to conduct “transversal activities” internally and to develop alliances with Canadian partners; . increased recourse to contingent labor; and . a trend towards teamwork through the establishment of program initiatives. In addition, the reform of the center includes post-bureaucratic regulations that are specific to public service enterprises (Kernaghan, 2000): . a focus on new interested parties vs being centered on itself, through efforts to become closer to the Canadian community; . a focus on results rather than on process, reflected in the introduction of performance indicators; and . revenue driven financing, reflected in cost recovery efforts and income diversification. It can be concluded that the reform corresponds to the adoption of a post-bureaucratic organizational model and that the new structure is intended to favor rapid, low-cost adaptation to a changing environment. However, and despite the fact that the vast majority of those interviewed believe that the reform was necessary to ensure the survival of the center, it has given rise to comments which express doubts about its benefits. The cuts were “savage,” they have created “disorder” and “insecurity.” For many of the actors, the reform means that the center has grown away from its “true masters” [the recipients], and has “lost its soul.” The center appears to be a mass of confusion; the management and organization of work are ambiguous; the tasks and chain of command are unclear; the composition of the teams is not well defined; and there is a lack of leadership (team leaders have emerged, but were not officially recognized until 1997). The structure of the programs branch is vague. From a structure based on disciplines, which made it easy to interpret

the center’s work, the staff say that they are faced with themes that have no tangible meaning. Above all, in the opinion of many actors, the structure now comes between the program officers and the recipients, because the problems of the developing countries are subordinated to the priorities of the center’s program. The institutional program destroyed traditional flexibility, and the resulting program initiatives are “little bits of territory that are hard [for the recipients] to enter.” The center changed from a simple organization operating according to an easily understandable process which resulted in assistance that was appreciated by the recipients, to a complex organization which the recipients find difficult to understand, with no guarantee of results. In 1995-1996 the center’s activity, measured in terms of the dollar value of projects allocated during one year, barely reached 50 percent of the established objective. The reform has been accompanied by a discourse which is foreign to the center’s values and is based on solutions that are just as foreign to it. The reform has been on a collision course, clashing with values and the integration practices of collective activity. The clash of values The theories of Kernaghan (2000) and Kamto (1997) help to explain the clash of values provoked by the center’s adoption of a post-bureaucratic model of organization. They demonstrate that the post-bureaucratic model is heavily influenced by private sector thinking and neo-liberal ideology, which clash with public sector values. Moreover, Kernaghan (2000) maintains that the post-bureaucratic model is based on professional values (efficiency, teamwork, innovation) which conflict with the public corporation’s ethical and democratic values of a sense of accountability/responsibility, commitment, transparency, impartiality. The impact on ethical and democratic values is felt all the more by the staff who see the center as a “lefty organization” carrying on a humanitarian mission and having established a “unique style of international operation” (disinterested aid, non-colonising, uncontrolling) based on knowledge work, intellectual exchanges and well-established relationships with the recipients, foreign institutions and ministries. The clash of integration practices The theory of structuration can explain this clash of integration practices, since “duality of structure” requires that structure and social relations be conceptualized separately to better isolate the integration practices that govern their transmutation or reproduction. Moreover, the theory can provide a good understanding of the reform, since it allows investigation of the forms and content of integration practices and of relations of which they are part. Firstly, it is possible to identify forms of integration as social or systemic (Giddens, 1984). Practices are considered to be social integration practices when they help to establish relations between actors in contexts of co-presence, and they are systemic integration practices when they establish a relationship between actors across extended time-space. For example, a budget is an integration tool and thus may constitute a systemic integration practice if reciprocal relations are established across time-space, without meetings taking place. Defined as integration practices, control practices contribute to creating trust in organizations. However, it appears that trust is not necessarily shared if it mainly

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depends on systemic integration practices. In the example of the reciprocal relations established through the budget, it may be that senior managers have greater trust in the managers’ activity than the latter do in their peers and senior managers, if the senior managers are the only ones who are able to monitor the budgets. The nature of integration is an important characteristic of the organizational strength of management control practices, since systemic integration practices are less dependent than social integration practices on the collaboration of the actors (Giddens, 1990). It should be noted that integration is, perhaps, not always entirely social, nor entirely systemic, and that it may be better conceptualized as a continuum with a social integration pole and a systemic integration pole (Briand, 2001). Nevertheless, this categorization is useful for analytical purposes. Secondly, Giddens (1984) suggests that integration of a social system across time and space involves a combination of two types of resources: allocative and authoritative. In the context of enterprises, allocative resources can be translated into: . financial and human resources; . expertise and knowledge as well as production and administrative processes needed to carry out an activity; and . capacity to define the good or service to be produced and the identification of the “client.” On the other hand, authoritative resources are equivalent to: . control that may be exercised by the actors in the different areas of the enterprise (units, divisions, offices, etc.), giving them their distinctive nature; . capacity of an actor or group of actors to organize the action of actors outside his/their formal interaction group; and . capacity of an actor or group of actors to influence his/their opportunities for development or expression, and those of other actors. On the basis of this typology of resources, we can specify the content of control practices and distinguish between the practices that provide power over material resources and those that act on agents. It is worth mentioning that allocation resources do not guarantee influence on the actors: hence, integration of a social system is largely dependent on the presence of authoritative resources. Thirdly, Giddens (1984, p. 258) argues that resources form the “media of the expandable character of power in different societies”, and that authoritative resources are important sources of power (transformation capacity) and domination (relational dimension of power), and hence “levers” of social change. The augmenting of material resources is fundamental to the expansion of power, but allocative resources cannot be developed without the transmutation of authoritative resources, and the latter are undoubtedly at least as important in providing “levers” of social change as the former (Giddens, 1984, p. 260).

Structurationist analysis of integration practices thus allows further contextualization and understanding of organizational transformations since it entails in-depth investigation of the relations of which practices are a part.

In summary, from a structurationist perspective, an organization can be conceptualized as a social system which is made up of, and which makes up, the management control practices and social relations which prevail within it. Control practices are sources of power and of domination, which are involved in the relations between the actors, and they can be understood by examining the forms of integration that can be achieved and their content. Thus, the structurationist perspective makes it possible to understand the functioning of a social system and to contextualize its transformations. Forms of integration, content of practices, power and domination relating to the center may be analyzed as follows, in order to interpret the shift to post-bureaucracy. The main transformations are summarized in Table I and discussed thereafter. The forms of integration. The reforms involved the introduction of new integration practices (program initiatives, institutional affairs directorate, term contracts, etc.) and the elimination or replacement of practices favored since the center’s establishment (“project-by-project” planning and discipline-based divisions in particular). The reforms have brought about a systematization of integration practices, which supports and is supported by surveillance. An example of this is the PWB, which traditionally had stimulated exchanges between the actors in contexts of co-presence. From 1993 onwards, the allocations were divided up, according to a pre-established formula, between the themes of the institutional program. Thus, the institutional program can be updated and, with the PWB, structures a set of practices, which provides direction to and allows for the surveillance of the work of officers without meetings taking place. Both the PWB and the institutional program can be seen as systemic integration practices, because they establish a relationship between the managers and officers across extended time-space. In the same way, the Board of Governors (historically viewed as a forum for discussion on the substance of projects) became a space with limited access in the 1990s. The governors no longer examined projects, focusing their attention instead on the institutional program, the prospectuses (planning documents prepared by each team) and management reports. As a result, to all intents and purposes, face-to-face discussions between the governors and program officers were eliminated. A reciprocal relationship between the governors and officers was established, but without them meeting. In addition, this relationship had more to do with administrative than scientific content. Again, the Board of Governors became a systemic integration practice because it helped to establish a relationship between the governors and officers without co-presence. Obviously, meetings continued to take place between the Bureaucratic period

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Post-bureaucratic period

Planning “Project by project” Institutional program Coordination Board of Governors Board of Governors Discipline-based divisions Program initiatives Regional offices devoted to regional programming Centralized administrative services Central institutional services Corporate services branch Term contracts Surveillance PWB PWB (allocation by theme) Performance indicators

Table I. Evolution of integration practices

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governors and the senior managers, but, strictly speaking, they did not contribute to achieving the mission of the center because the content of discussions had changed. The content of practices. Considered in terms of their content, i.e. the type of resources on which they act, the reforms impact on actors more so than material allocation resources do. For example, practices such as the “Corporate Services Branch” and “Centralized administrative services” alter the control that may be exercised by the program officers within program initiatives, as well as their capacity to influence the work of others. Moreover, two practices adopted with the reform, term contracts and performance indicators, potentially impact on the life chances of workers (program officers as well as administrative professionals and support staff), as job security and opportunities for advancement become uncertain. This is of great importance since, as Giddens (1991) maintains, work strongly conditions life chances. Although work is not a “total institution” as choice of work and work milieu form a basic element of lifestyle orientations, styles of behavior in the workplace are less subject to the individual’s personal control than in non-work contexts. Therefore, Giddens suggest, it would be wrong to suppose that lifestyles only relates to activities outside of work. Thus integration practices become fundamental to understand the availability of potential lifestyles. Our case study suggests that the displacement of integration practices (from material resources to actors) is an important feature of post-bureaucracy. Therefore, we agree with Maravelias (2003, p. 547) that “post-bureaucracy displaces the responsibility for setting limits between professional and non-professional concerns from the organization to the individual,” but argue that the effects of post-bureaucracy within a specific social system cannot be discovered while disregarding the social relations of which they are a part. Power and domination. In order to understand these social relations, we classified integration practices into “practices dominated by” and “practices influenced by” senior management, as illustrated in Table II. (The analysis of power and domination of all the groups of actors is to be found in Briand, 2001.) The table shows that the post-bureaucratic period is characterized by the expansion of power of senior managers: through the institutional program, they become Bureaucratic period Post-bureaucratic period Practices dominated Practices influenced Practices dominated Practices influenced by senior by senior by senior by senior management management management management Planning

Table II. Analysis of the domination and influence exercised by senior managers

Coordination

Central institutional Corporate services services branch

Surveillance

PWB

Institutional program Centralized administrative services Term contracts PWB (allocation by theme) Performance indicators

participants in the area of planning, a field that had historically been dominated by the governors and program officers. Also, senior managers increasingly influence coordination and surveillance. Above all, the integration practices that the senior managers influence generally have a greater impact on the actors than on resources; specifically, they give them power over workers’ lifestyles. In our case study, the gradual elimination or transformation of existing practices and the introduction of new practices by senior managers that are characteristic of the post-bureaucratic organization have brought about a new “order” which relies on a centralized model of governance and a flexible, contingent co-ordination. The traditional flexibility and contingency of the center have been shifted – indeed, since 1991, flexibility and contingency have characterized the actors more so than the strategic directions. Thus post-bureaucracy, as experienced by the actors of the center: . has supported the displacement of surveillance and its intensification; and . has contributed to the production of a new structure of domination. Conclusion In light of the theories of late modernity and structuration, organizational forms become undetermined but, nevertheless, not random phenomena. As sets of integration practices, which are constructed through social activity, they become both the process and result of their structuration. Furthermore, the case study shows that organizational forms are, first and foremost, a set of practices that help structure the relationship between actors. To understand an organizational model and its effects, it is therefore necessary to study the forms of integration that can be achieved and the resources they provide in specific contexts. It thus appears that the ambiguities associated with new organizational forms require that greater conceptual space be given to power and domination as well as to contexts in order to assess their issues and effects. Finally, the mutations and displacement of surveillance practices brought about by organizational transformations, as exemplified by our case study, coupled with the “emergence of life politics,” point to the need for future research dealing with choices and lifestyles. This is important because, in late modernity, there is a need to distinguish between the impulses towards personal growth on the one hand, and capitalistic pressures towards personal advantage and material accumulation on the other; moreover, it is crucial because, in the arena of life politics, power is generative rather than hierarchical. References Bellemare, G. (1995), “Vers l’e´tablissement de nouvelles pratiques de surveillance et de nouveaux rapports sociaux de production et de service. Le cas de la STCUM”, unpublished PhD thesis, Sociology Department, UQAM, Montreal. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005), The New Spirit of Capitalism, Gallimard, Paris, (French version: 1999). Briand, L. (2001), “Analyse structurationniste du controˆle de gestion dans la modernite´ et la modernite´ avance´e”, PhD thesis, E´cole des Hautes E´tudes Commerciales, Montreal. Cahiers du CRISES, Collection the`ses et me´moires, Vol. 2 No. 1. Briand, L. and Bellemare, G. (2006), “Organisation post-bureaucratique et flexibilite´: mais de quelle flexibilite´ s’agit-il?”, in Lapointe, P.A. and Bellemare, G. (Eds), Innovations sociales dans le travail et l’emploi. Recherches empiriques et perspectives the´oriques. Presses de l’Universite´ Laval, Que´bec (in press).

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Castells, M. (2001), The Internet Galaxy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Courpasson, D. and Dany, F. (2003), “Indifference or obedience? Business firm as democratic hybrids”, Organization Studies, Vol. 24 No. 8, pp. 1231-60. Courpasson, D. and Reed, M. (2004), “Introduction: bureaucracy in the age of the enterprise”, Organization, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 5-12. Dandeker, C. (1990), Surveillance, Power and Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. Giddens, A. (1976), New Rules of Sociological Method, Hutchison & Co., London. Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. Giddens, A. (1990), The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Giddens, A. (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Grey, C. and Garsten, C. (2001), “Trust, control and bureaucracy”, Organization Studies, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp. 229-50. Heckscher, C. and Donnellon, A. (Eds) (1994), The Post-bureaucratic Organization. New Perspectives on Organizational Change, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Hodgson, D.E. (2004), “Project work: the legacy of bureaucratic control in the post-bureaucratic organization”, Organization, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 81-100. Hopper, W.D. (1970) Statement to the Inaugural Meeting of the Board of Governors of the International Development Research Center, IDRC, Ottawa, October 26. Jones, D. (2003), New Economy Handbook, Academic Press, San Diego, CA. Kamto, M. (1997), “Reaffirming public-service values and professionalism”, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Vol. 63, pp. 295-308. Ka¨rrerman, D. and Alvesson, M. (2004), “Cages in tandem: management control, social identity, and identification in a knowledge-intensive firm”, Organization, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 149-75. Ka¨rrerman, D., Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (2002), “The return of the machine bureaucracy? Management control in the work settings of professionals”, International Studies of Management & Organization, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 70-92. Kernaghan, K. (2000), “L’organisation post-bureaucratique et les valeurs du service public”, Revue Internationale Des Sciences Administratives, Vol. 66 No. 1, pp. 107-22. MacKenzie, R. (2002), “The migration of bureaucracy: contracting and the regulation of labour in the telecommunications industry”, Work, Employment & Society, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 599-616. Maravelias, C. (2003), “Post-bureaucracy – control through professional freedom”, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 16 No. 5, pp. 547-66. Mohiddin, A. (1993), “International development agencies and the problem of African development”, research paper, IDRC, Ottawa. Ra¨isa¨nen, C. and Linde, A. (2004), “Technologizing discourse to standardize projects in multi-projects organisations: hegemony by consensus”, Organization, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 101-21. Robertson, M. and Swan, J. (2003), “Control – what control? Culture and ambiguity within a knowledge intensive firm”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 831-58. Further reading Audet, M. and De´ry, R. (1996), “La science re´fle´chie: quelques empreintes de l’e´piste´mologie des sciences de l’administration Anthropologie et socie´te´s”, Anthropologie et socie´te´s, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 103-23.

Bouquin, H. (1994), Les fondements du controˆle de gestion, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Bouquin, H. (1996), “Pourquoi le controˆle de gestion existe-t-il encore?”, Gestion, revue internationale de gestion, Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 97-103. Briand, L. (1996), “Le controˆle de gestion: l’e´volution passe par la re´volution”, Gestion, revue internationale de gestion, Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 116-9. Kaplan, R.S. (1984), “The evolution of management accounting”, The Accounting Review, Vol. 59 No. 3, pp. 390-418.

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Martin Harris Essex University, Colchester, UK Abstract Purpose – In recent years it has been argued that the widespread adoption of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) presages the “end” of bureaucracy and its replacement by new and more flexible organisational forms. The purpose of this paper is to question contemporary accounts of “the network enterprise” and “the virtual organisation”, arguing that these are founded on a logic which abstracts innovation from its institutional and organisational context. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a case study analysis of the British Library to explore the relationship between ICTs and new organisational forms. Findings – The case study evidence suggests that there is a need to go beyond the binary opposition of “bureaucratic” and “post-bureaucratic” forms. The evidence also shows that the bureaucratic form was associated with the institutional legacies, expertise and practices that are crucial in fostering innovation. Originality/value – The paper shows that the bureaucratic context offers a more propitious environment for innovation than has been suggested by managerialist accounts of the “post-bureaucratic organization”. Keywords Bureaucracy, Innovation, Communication technologies, Digital libraries, Organizational change, United Kingdom Paper type Case study

Journal of Organizational Change Management Vol. 19 No. 1, 2006 pp. 80-92 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0953-4814 DOI 10.1108/09534810610643703

Introduction: technology, innovation and the “post-bureaucratic” world Recent years have seen an increasing volume of comment on the supposed “end” of bureaucracy and its replacement by new and more flexible organisational forms in the emergent “knowledge society” (Reed and Courpasson, 2004; Alvesson and Thompson, 2004). Adversarial comment on bureaucracy cannot be regarded as new. Burns and Stalker’s seminal work on innovation and organisational structure, published in the early 1960s, built on earlier critiques of “rational” bureaucracy (Merton, 1949; Crozier, 1964; Blau, 1955; Burns and Stalker, 1961). But the late 1970s saw a much more fundamental questioning of bureaucracy and its role in organising the advanced industrial societies. An extensive body of work on “post-Fordism” and “flexible specialization” contended that the organizational forms which had underpinned the rapid economic growth of the post-war era could not be expected to deliver the same performance in the much more turbulent and uncertain conditions of the 1980s and 1990s. This line of argument has been a central feature of comment on information technology over the last 30 years (McLoughlin and Clark, 1994; McLoughlin and Harris, 1997) and it bulks large in the work of those who argue that the information revolution can be understood as a “new techno-economic paradigm” (Freeman and Perez, 1994; Freeman and Louca, 2001; Castells, 2000).

Whereas in the 1970s Daniel Bell and other theorists of postindustrialism regarded the state as central to the technological society (Bell, 1974; Kumar, 1995; Mattelart, 2003), the closing decades of the twentieth century saw a growing conviction that innovation was best left to the free market. Private sector corporations operating in sectors such as telecommunications and information technology came to be regarded as the primary locus of innovation and, with the advent of the internet, a new generation of US “cybergurus” (Negroponte, 1995; Dyson, 1997; Kelly, 1998) claimed that ICTs were the natural province of entrepreneurial capitalism. These authors championed the “mobility of knowledge” arguing that the ubiquity and costlessness of information would undermine the position of large established providers in industries such as media and communications. In the UK, policy makers such as Hague (1996, p. 22) wrote that the digital revolution would undermine the role of traditional universities, arguing that “people will increasingly use knowledge where it is and not where it is institutionalised”. All of these above commentators draw heavily on imagery which equates information technology and innovation with atomisation, dispersal and disaggregation (Leadbeater, 1999). These elements are apparent in contemporary accounts of the post-bureaucratic organisation, invariably represented as decentralised, loosely coupled, non-hierarchical and fluid. Manuel Castells’ theory of the “network enterprise” is premised on the view that “vertical bureaucracies” are being transformed into “horizontal corporations”. He defines the network organization is defined as: . . . a dynamic and strategically planned network of self programmed units based on decentralization, participation and coordination (2000, p. 178).

Like many other advocates of the new paradigm, Castells cites intensified competition, globalised production networks, information technology and an increased prevalence of knowledge work as major “drivers” of the new organisational forms (Child and McGrath, 2001; Hedberg, 1997). Whilst supporters of the new paradigm have maintained that the information revolution will precipitate a historically decisive break from bureaucracy, several areas of academic enquiry and debate suggest a more equivocal view. Several studies have pointed to the historic role of bureaucracy in creating and sustaining innovation networks (Fransman, 1990; Johnson, 1982; Molina, 1990; Howells and Hine, 1993). Other studies have found that there is no necessary homology between decentralised forms and “knowledge intensive” activities such as research and development. (Hill et al., 2000; Coombs and Richards, 1993; Coombs, 1996). Thirty years of research on the organisational changes associated with a range of information technologies shows that these are not conditioned by the technology itself, but by inherently complex managerial choices (Child, 1972, 1997). IT is potentially compatible with both centralised and decentralised organisational forms (Barras, 1994) and has frequently been used to enhance managerial control of day-to-day operations (McLoughlin and Clark, 1994; McLoughlin and Harris, 1997). The large scale adoption of IT in services is associated, moreover, with standardisation, routinisation and “industrial” scale in sectors such as education, leisure and entertainment – precisely those sectors where recent commentary on the “knowledge organisation” predicted a decisive break with the structures and controls of industrial capitalism (Cohen and Zysman, 1994; Quinn, 1992; Alvesson and Thompson, 2004).

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Comment on technology and post bureaucracy has been pitched at two several distinct levels of analysis. At one level, technology is viewed as a key factor in contemporary restructuring and changes in the political economy of production. Another body of comment views technology as a key element in changes which have occurred at the organisational level (variously, the “post-bureaucratic” “networked”; or “virtual” organisation). Comment on “hybrid political regimes” and “democratic hierarchies” is centred on the long-standing question of how organisations combine centralised control and co-ordination of resources with flexibility offered by agents on the ground. Thus, Reed and Courpasson (2004) show that project managers exercised considerable autonomy, but did so within a wider bureaucratic context. Hill et al. (2000) show that the marketised and decentralised responses of advanced manufacturers to changing product markets coincided with more centralised financial control of strategically important R þ D resources. The theme of “hybridisation” indicates the need to go beyond the binary oppositions inherent in the idea of the “post-bureaucractic” organisation. Organizational hybrids are characterized by open-endedness and diversity[1]. The theme of organisational hybridity points to the emergence of new and more reflexive organisational structures – it also highlights new cognitive and cultural orientations which are outside those commonly ascribed to the bureaucratic form (Dent, 1995; Courpasson, 2000; Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). ICT and innovation in public service delivery The changes described by advocates of “the post-bureaucractic organisation” have had a particular relevance for the public sector. Most of the advanced industrial economies have experienced a “rolling back” of the state and attempts to curb the inefficiencies ascribed to public sector bureaucracies. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, attempts to restructure public sector organizations have been very substantially influenced by “the New Public Management” (NPM) (Hood, 1998). Studies of the organizational changes associated with NPM have highlighted the part played by managerial control strategies that blend standardised performance measures with attempts to introduce changes in the culture and professional practices of public sector organizations (Ferlie, 1996; Kirkpatrick and Martinez Lucio, 1995; Farrell and Morris, 2003). These strategies have formed a serious threat to the “professional syndicalism” previously practiced by professional elites in the UK public sector (Reed, 1995). Whilst authors working in a “managerialist” vein have little or nothing to say on the question of public sector values, Reed and Courpasson (2004) hypothesise that the values and cognitive orientations of the public sector may be “swept away” by the political, economic and technological conditions of the post bureaucratic world. The rapid diffusion of ICTs across the public sector adds a substantial degree of complexity to these changes. These technologies features prominently in claims made by supporters of post-bureaucracy, but these claims have not been corroborated by empirical studies. A partial exception is the substantial body of research that has grown up around the burgeoning academic field of e-government. Studies have revealed a complex mix of continuity and change, much of it directly mediated by public sector professionals responsible for IT-based service delivery (Dutton and Guthrie, 1991; Bellamy and Taylor, 1998; Dutton, 1999). In many cases the technical and organizational changes observed by researchers have a distinctly utilitarian character which does little to support visions of “digital government”. While many of the changes associated with

large scale investment in IT can be equated with rationalization and cost cutting in “machine bureaucracies” (Cabinet Office, 2000; Curthoys and Crabtree, 2003), the UK context provides some evidence for genuinely new interactive public services, for example, those which have emerged in healthcare (NHS.Direct); local and central government services (uk.Gov), and the new digital services offered by the BBC. One of the most pervasive claims made for the information society was that ICT would make possible learning on a highly decentralized “anyone, anyplace anytime” basis. The recent marked increase in academic work on ICT and institutional change in higher education (HE) (Dutton and Loader, 2002; Robins and Webster, 2002; Noble, 1998) displays strong commonalities with the current interest in post-bureaucracy. The enthusiastic endorsement of the “virtual campus” concept by leading commentators (Hague, 1996; Handy, 1995; Negroponte, 1995) contrasts strongly with more critical work which regards virtual learning as synonymous with the commodification of the public sphere and the homogenisation which comes from corporate control of the new digital media (Schiller, 1999). Some commentators claim that global information networks may have triggered a “dereferentialisation of knowledge” which detaches learning from its institutional and national context (Robins and Webster, 2002, p. 5), whilst others have argued that global information networks may act to undermine the autonomy of learning institutions, as their public service remit “becomes diffused in a new set of social relations” (Delanty, 2002, p. 42). Agre’s (2000) review of ICT and institution change in HE, offers an alternative to this polarization, arguing that if ICTs do in fact “standardize the world”, then they do so in ways which also reflect institutional specificity and choice. The last 30 years have seen a large volume of empirical work on information technology and organisational change. The main thrust of this work is that the implementation of this technology is heavily influenced by both the context of its introduction and by the strategic interests of actors on the ground. It follows that ICT needs to be examined in the light of particular institutional contexts and social practices if specific research is progress beyond the highly programmatic, a historical and decontextualised claims made for post-bureaucracy. It is with this in mind that this paper draws on research, which investigated the extensive programme of digitisation and organizational change, which has occurred at the British Library (Harris, 2005 for a fuller account) in recent years. This case study depicts an organization characterized by advanced forms of service delivery, the extensive use of ICT, and an increasingly internationalised context of operations. The case study allows us to consider the possibility that intensive use of ICTs may allow bureaucracy to be replaced by new and more flexible “hybrid” regimes of accountability and control. We also consider the longer-term implications of these hybrid forms for the public service values embodied by public libraries. Digitisation and institutional change: the case of the British Library As a library of legal deposit, the British Library (BL) is responsible for the integrity of the national published archive, and has been the single most influential body in lobbying for the principle of legal deposit to be extended to electronic resources in the UK. A series of reports, policy reviews and press statements (available at: www.bl.uk/ news/report.html) have affirmed the BL public service remit to serve its traditional users in HE whilst emphasising a new commitment to corporate and business users. The BL has responded to government policies on social inclusion by extending this

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remit to include “non-traditional” users such as life-long learners and schoolchildren. Digitisation is central to the BL mission of providing “access to the world’s knowledge”, and new developments in ICT feature heavily in maintaining the BL’s position as the largest provider within the UK national research infrastructure. More than 50 per cent of BL activity is aimed at supporting HE, and a further 25 per cent is directed towards support for industry and business. Three specific digitisation projects are explored below. The first relates to the introduction of electronic document delivery (EDD). The second is the use of the internet to bring BL web resources to lifelong learners and schools; the third shows the BL involvement in the development of new research infrastructures serving the UK HE sector. Electronic document delivery The BL is one of the world’s largest repositories of intellectual property and has long been recognised as a leading supplier of documents to academic and business users in the UK and abroad. The introduction of EDD via the web has allowed the BL to commercialise one of its most highly regarded services. About 70 per cent of the BL document supply transactions are still paper-based, but operators now convert documents held as hard copy into files, which are then emailed direct to library users. The existing paper-based document supply service has long been offered to university users on a cost-free basis, but recent moves to disseminate published material (notably journal articles) via the web have involved the BL in extensive discussions over issues of security and copyright compliance with leading publishers. The library is currently using digital rights management (DRM) software (developed jointly with Adobe Systems) to charge fees for documents supplied. The BL has also consolidated its position as a leading document supplier through its collaboration with Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific and medical journals. The library is currently adding more publishers to the service, and EDD is helping to establish the BL-Adobe DRM software as the industry standard for the research market. The BL is thus acting as a broker, which mediates between the interests of publishers and those of BL users. EDD has created a new revenue stream in document supply and there are plans to develop a range of new commercial services for corporate clients, although 80 per cent of the basic charge made to users is levied on behalf of the publishers who hold the copyright on the material supplied. Digitising the BL collections: the Collect Britain (CB) project The idea of providing online access to BL collections was closely bound up with the library’s response to policies aimed at fostering an inclusive “learning society”. Internal documentation shows that this was a prominent theme in a major review of strategy carried out in 2001; “learning society” objectives have also featured in successive annual reports. In 1999 the National Lottery New Opportunities Fund launched a £50M programme aimed at reducing social exclusion by encouraging the provision of new digital content and learning media. In 2001 the BL won NOF funding of £3.5M to provide online access to its collections. This initiative, which became known as CB, was aimed at bringing web content of local and regional interest to life-long learners, teachers and schoolchildren. One senior member of staff interviewed noted that the project was designed around the need for a regional appeal which would help to overcome the perception of the BL as an “elitist” “metropolitan” institution. Another interviewee

stated that the project provided a way of “making the national library fully national”. The project was also shaped by broader definitions of British citizenship – the content includes material from the home countries of UK citizens from South Asia and the Caribbean. Incorporating themed tours and virtual exhibitions of historic maps, ephemera, manuscripts, photographs, music scores, prints and drawings, CB is the largest digital media project ever undertaken by the BL. The BL has also collaborated with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Public Record Office (PRO) on the “21st Century Citizen” initiative, an online resource for 11-16 year olds which was incorporated into the national curriculum for UK schools in September 2002. Implementing the Collect Britain project Plans to develop public access to BL web resources reflected the BL commitment to socially inclusive “learning society” policies, but these plans also reveal the political aspects of project implementation. The senior managers responsible for resourcing the project left open the question of how the newly digitised material was to be interpreted and presented in ways, which would engage with the specific needs of life long learners and schoolchildren. The curator responsible for the day-to-day management of CB was thus uncertain about the needs and assumptions of those at whom the project was directed. The head of the BL education service saw the initiative as an opportunity to experiment with different modes of engagement with schoolchildren and teachers, arguing that using the web to reach a wider audience was dependent not on the volume of material digitised nor on the functionality of the website, but on the library’s ability to develop new forms of outreach and interpretative content. It later became clear that developing the website as a learning tool would require considerable investment in specialized online learning expertise and a corresponding shift of resources away from the volume production of digitised content towards the interpretation of this content. The senior curators responsible for the project later concluded that the BL is primarily a content provider, rather than an educational service provider. The library’s primary commitment to HE and business users meant that efforts to embark on new educational activities were “inevitably under resourced”. The BL is currently considering ways in which the CB content can be “repurposed” and merged with other electronic resources currently being developed by the library. The Twenty-first Century Citizen initiative offers a contrasting example of digitisation: although much less ambitious in terms of the volume of images digitised, this initiative drew on the combined expertise of three established content providers and a specialized interactive media agency to provide web content and enquiry-based learning for the UK schools curriculum. The British Library and the UK research libraries network The introduction of new information utilities and web resources at the BL highlights the ways in which these technologies have enabled changes in the services offered to the library’s core users. The BL is, furthermore a dominant players in a high level advisory body known as the Research Libraries Support Group (RLSG), established in 2001 by the four UK HE funding councils, the British Library and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales. The RLSG’s final report, published in 2003, shows that the BL is playing a key role in facilitating a number of broader technological and institutional changes which are occurring at the national level (www.rlsg.ac.uk). A particular focus

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of concern is the “double crisis” in the price and volume of research periodicals, arguing that the UK research infrastructure is faced with resource shortfalls which cannot be met by individual research libraries. The report calls for the formation of a new public body, the Research Libraries Network (RLN), based on collaboration between a range of players including the HE funding councils, the British Library, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and other UK research libraries. This network has four major components: (1) the university libraries (with dual function of research and teaching); (2) the national libraries including the British Library and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales; (3) dedicated research libraries and archives; and (4) material made available online from a range of sources including the information environment managed by JISC. The RLSG aims to mitigate the current resource shortfalls by encouraging collaboration on the acquisition of research resources. The RLSG reports some progress being made in negotiations at national level, but notes that support for collaborative acquisition or rationalisation between individual libraries is very limited. Turning to the longer-term process of “deep resource sharing” and collaborative management of collections the report states that: . . . strong constraints exist upon deeper resource sharing. These include concerns about loss of control by an institution over resources for its own staff and students; and about what would happen if a scheme collapsed or a participating institution changed its policies (RLSG, 2003, para 76).

The RLSG case for a more directed approach to the co-ordination and rationalization of library resources has been made on the assumption that the BL will retain its position as the largest UK provider of information to academic and business researchers. A careful reading of the report, and interviews carried out with senior BL personnel active within the RLSG, suggests that the proposed redistribution of library resources may result in an enhanced role for a small group of leading “hub” institutions (including British Library, the national libraries of Scotland and Wales and the larger university libraries) which would become the major providers for the UK HE sector as a whole. The concept of the “hybrid library” (RLSG, 2003, para 54-6) has emerged from the recognition that the key issue facing providers of research resources for the UK academic community is not simply the addition of new electronic formats, but the use of these formats in the management of existing collections held as hard copy. The RLSG reports, moreover, that there is no complete catalogue of holdings for the major UK research providers, and that a considerable volume of hard copy remains uncatalogued, or catalogued only in manual form, rendering this material invisible to online searches (RLSG, 2003 para 64-6). The RLSG expects that the task of rationalising national resources will require extensive collaboration between institutions on the mapping, assessment and management of collections which are at present dispersed throughout the UK’s research libraries. The RLSG supports efforts by JISC and others to develop integrated resource discovery tools such as the recently developed Serials Union National Catalogue (SUNCAT). The scale of the integration it envisages is such that the actual form taken by the proposed RLN will almost certainly

be determined by protracted processes of negotiation between different stakeholders (e.g. the research councils; the HE Funding Council for England and its specialist committees such as JISC; university Vice Chancellors; academic user groups). Previous examples of large scale network formation suggests that the process will unfold incrementally within an overall pattern of change whose final form will only become apparent in the longer term (Molina, 1990; Dutton and Guthrie, 1991; Howells and Hine, 1993). Many scholars within the e-Science community already use the internet to share provisional and interim research findings. As specialized software becomes more generally available, this will offer wholly new ways of presenting and sharing research information. The RLSG envisages that new electronic formats may serve the double purpose of reducing the research community’s dependence on academic publishers, whilst providing more effective ways of archiving electronic materials. As noted in the introduction, the BL has been a prime mover in efforts to extend the principle of legal deposit to electronic resources. The BL is also involved in a number of digital preservation initiatives, including the digital preservation coalition of national libraries, which has been established to foster long-term collaboration on preservation strategies and tools. The senior curators responsible for long term thinking about digital preservation at the BL regard the web as inherently unsuited to the task of retaining and preserving electronic content in perpetuity. The JISC has therefore proposed the formation of a UK digital curation centre which will act as a central repository for file formats, preservation software and archiving tools. Summary of findings and conclusions We have now examined the ways in which ICT was related to both specific organisational changes made at the British library, and to broader patterns of institutional change. The analysis that follows begins by highlighting the broader policy context of the observed changes, then moves on to consider the implications of the case study findings for the debate on hybridisation and the “end” of bureaucracy. The programme of investment in ICT was very substantially informed by the modernising imperatives of the “NPM”. Senior management statements emphasised the need for new revenue streams, marketisation and consumer choice. The broader policy context was, however, one in which BL services were being extended to a widened constituency of business users, lifelong learners, schoolchildren and the general public. The changes observed at the BL cannot be read as a simple transposition of public sector values for marketisation and “enterprise” (Du Gay, 2000). On the contrary, the public sector remit of the library has been substantially broadened and this has been driven by new and more stringent criteria of public sector accountability. The ICT projects investigated were thus embedded in an overtly “bureaucratic” context. ICT and new organisational hybrids The introduction has noted the tendency for comment on technology and organisational change to equate ICT with decentralisation and devolved control. Information networks were a significant part in the reforms at the BL – but it is important to note that these were deployed in very different ways in different parts of the operation with different implications. The CB project was sanctioned by the BL senior management team, but managed on an “arms length” basis. By contrast, the

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EDD project was conceived and managed in ways which reflected much more direct links between senior management, the head of operations management and the project engineer. Changes in the day-to-day operations of the library were complemented by more complex changes in relationships with library users and with external collaborators. Comment on “organisational hybrids” and “democratic hierarchies” is centred on the idea that organisations may combine centralised control and coordination of resources with flexibility offered by agents on the ground (Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). The three main ICT projects described above required collaboration with partners from outside the BL and there were clear indications of “hybridity” in each of these initiatives. In the case of EDD, collaboration centred on a cluster of private sector partners in global market for document supply. The introduction of EDD provides the BL with the opportunity to offer a range of commercial services to academic and business users and this has introduced an element of marketisation into relations between the BL and its readers. However, a more significant aspect of this project is that it has allowed the BL to enhance its role as a broker of intellectual property, mediating between the strategic interests of publishers and library users in the UK and abroad. The notion of hybridity can be related to the idea that bureaucracies might be moving towards more devolved organizational structures – but hybridisation also relates to the ways in which different forms of expertise may be juxtaposed within the innovation process. Strategic collaboration between content providers and interactive media specialists was a key factor in the one project (the Twenty-first Century Citizen e-learning initiative) where the BL succeeded in effectively disseminating web resources to schools. This corroborates the idea that the ability to create new forms of online service delivery depends on the ability to manage complementary intellectual and creative assets (Quinn, 1992; Star and Ruhleder, 1996; OECD, 2001). The above findings suggest that public sector values, “heterogenous” expertise and institutionalised practices are tightly bundled within highly localized settings. One result of this “bundling” is that the changes envisaged by policy makers and senior management may be substantially modified or reinterpreted by actors on the ground. It may thus be argued that the “expert power” exercised by public sector professionals is crucial in defining the “contested terrain” of post-bureaucracy. ICT, institutions and the “end” of bureaucracy The introduction noted that ICTs have been associated with highly decentralised organisational forms and the separation of knowledge from its institutional context within HE (Dutton and Loader, 2002; Robins and Webster, 2002; Delanty, 2002). The use of networked technology and collaboration with private sector partners in the EDD project reflects a shift to more “disaggregated” organizational forms. This collaboration was, however, predicated on the fact that the BL maintains one of the world’s largest concentrations of intellectual property, and is thus able to offer publishers access to very large numbers of readers. The BL approach to new information utilities and infrastructures emphasized integration, concentration of resources and economies of scale. These aspects appear to have been overlooked by currently influential accounts of the “virtual organisation” (Harris, 1998, 2000). The evidence presented in this paper does little to support the view that the institutional role of large public information providers has been undermined. It would appear, however, that these providers are becoming more connected to other players in

the digital environment. The BL is playing a significant role in shaping the information infrastructure of the broader network of UK research libraries. Taken overall, the findings corroborate the view that HE institutions are playing a key role in the economies of information-based capitalism (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1997; Curie and Newson, 1998; Daniel, 1999; CVCP/HEFCE, 2000), thus undermining the caricatured view of the public sector as a technologically “laggard” recipient of private sector expertise. It would appear, on this view, that the bureaucratic context is capable of fostering a more propitious environment for innovation than has been suggested by managerialist accounts of the “post bureaucratic organisation”. Note 1. Maravelias (2003) distinguishes three separate strands of comment on the post-bureaucratic organisation. The first, “managerialist” strand argues that post-bureaucracy implies a complete break with the bureaucratic legacy. A second body of literature, derived from critical management theory, questions the view that post-bureaucracy marks an historically decisive “end” of bureaucratic controls (Barley and Kunda, 1992; Carr, 2000; Delbridge, 1995; Willmott, 1993). These authors highlight the advent of new, more subtle and pervasive managerial controls, for example, those associated with “the enterprising self” and the new forms of work organisation found in knowledge intensive firms. Maravelias endorses the critical view as a counterweight to the speculation and hype of the managerialist view – but he also argues that those working in the critical tradition deny the possibility of new forms of coordination and control. A third body of work has coalesced around the search for new conceptualisations of control offered by networks (Ackoff, 1994) and organisational “hybrids”. References Ackoff, R. (1994), The Democratic Corporation, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Agre, P. (2000), “Infrastructure and institutional change in the networked university”, Information, Communication and Society, Vol. 3 No. 4, pp. 494-507. Alvesson, M. and Thompson, P. (2004), “Post bureaucracy?”, in Ackroyd, S., Batt, R., Thompson, P. and Tolbert, P.S. (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Barley, S. and Kunda, G. (1992), “Design and devotion: surges of rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 37, pp. 363-99. Barras, R. (1994), “Interactive innovation in financial and business services: the vanguard of the service revolution”, in Rhodes, E. and Wield, D. (Eds), Implementing New Technologies, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 106-20. Bell, D. (1974), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, Heineman, London. Bellamy, C. and Taylor, J. (1998), Governing in the Information Age, Open University Press, Buckingham. Blau, P. (1955), The Dynamics of Bureaucracy, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Burns, T. and Stalker, G. (1961), The Management of Innovation, Tavistock, London. Carr, A. (2000), “Critical theory and the management of change in organizations”, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 208-20.

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Call for papers Journal of Organizational Change Management Special issue: ‘‘Managing the career, and control and commitment in knowledge intensive firms during periods of organizational change’’ Co-editors for this special issue: Pauline Gleadle and Graeme Salaman, the Open University Business School, UK; Nelarine Cornelius, Brunel University, UK and Eric Pezet, Ecole des Mines, Paris The focus of this special issue is on managing the control and commitment of knowledge workers, particularly during periods of substantial organizational change. In practice, the term knowledge worker covers a wide range of individuals from those employed in the media, advertising agencies and accountancy practices (Deetz, 1994) to those engaged in high tech Research & Development (Kunda, 1992). What these apparently diverse workers have in common is that not only are they the subject of much debate in the management literature, but they also tend to be viewed as quite different from other employees. These differences lie in their supposedly highly privileged position as workers who enjoy a substantial degree of autonomy and who also invest an extraordinarily high measure of their identity in their work. Indeed, according to this perspective, organizations have to be cautious in the management of knowledge workers or they will haemorrhage these valuable staff at a very real cost to their firms (Alvesson, 2000). HR practices including the management of the careers of knowledge workers therefore assume great importance. Career patterns of knowledge workers range from the partnership model of professional services firms, a model which is changing, to the media where there is a tradition of outsourcing to mini businesses. Similar developments are in progress in the pharmaceutical industry where large firms are increasingly managing the tension between exploitation and exploration (March, 1991) by outsourcing R&D activity, thereby raising again issues of control of these key workers and of their careers. Notions of enterprise (Salaman, 2004) play a role in these developments which varies for different types of knowledge worker. In accountancy firms, there is evidence of professional staff being expected to embrace notions of enterprise in order to become a partner whereas in the relatively recent past, it had been enough to be a competent if

hard-working subject specialist (e.g. a tax accountant). In the media world of outsourcing to mini businesses, notions of a career appear obsolete but instead workers have to engage notions of enterprise in acting as an entrepreneur of the self if they are to survive in this sector. In so doing, they may conclude that the job market in which they operate is unfair and so that ‘‘enterprise’’ is not working properly here. We welcome papers that address these issues and the dynamic context in which these changes are occurring. In order to build upon this body of work exploring issues around the management of knowledge workers, we would encourage theoretical and empirical papers as well as reviews of the literature. While this list is not meant to be exhaustive, we welcome interesting papers on knowledge workers from sociological, political, historical and psychological perspectives exploring agency, multiple identities and the importance of social roles. More specifically, we particularly welcome contributions from the following areas and angles: .

identities, resistance and control;

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discourse and narratives of identity; and

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emotional labour and discourses of enterprise.

Questions about this special issue, including expectations, requirements, appropriateness of topic and the like can be directed to Pauline Gleadle on [email protected]. Submission guidelines: Information for contributors to JOCM can be obtained from www.emeraldinsight.com/jocm.htm Submissions must adhere to the requirements for authors of JOCM. All submissions will be subject to double blind review per the journal review policy.